A British Pub

This weekend, Captain America and I went to Jayne's Gastropub with Barbie and Ken, Hispanic Barbie and Ken, and some friends of Hispanic Barbie and Ken.

Captain America had read about how Jayne's was supposed to be an authentic British Pub, and we were excited to try it with our friends.  We were seated at a large wooden picnic table on the back patio, which was adorned with lights, and potted plants, and was really quite a lovely setting.  And then we gave our drink orders and waited.  And waited. And waited.

We got our drinks and our other friends showed up.  And they ordered their drinks and waited.  And then we ordered dinner and waited. 

There was a lot of waiting.  The food was very good; the drinks were fantastic.  Hands down, they made the best lemon drop martinis I've ever had, but I would have been just as happy if they were 80% as good and served faster. 

The one other problem was that because we were at a large table we couldn't really chat with the people at the other end of the table.  That sort of defeats the purpose of going out with friends.

So, sadly this post is short.  Because there is no way for me to convey that the food was good, the beverages were wonderful, our friends are even better, without getting bogged down with how slow the service was.  If everything had happened about 5 minutes faster it would have been perfect, but, alas, this was not the case.

In a nut shell, don't bother going.

A busy Sunday

Today I ran the Carlsbad half marathon with my running buddy.  By her watch, we finished in 1:56, but I haven't been able to confirm the official results on the website yet.  The peak elevation of this race is 75', but that's deceptive--it's very hilly.  Obviously no BIG hills, but an ongoing series of rolling hills.  The flip side is, the course is along the coast, so it is very scenic and the views are excellent enough that you may even forget how far you're running for a minute or two.

My running buddy and I were well prepared for this race, having already run 12 and 13 miles as part of our training.  We didn't even stop to walk through the aid stations, except once, where I got in her way and there was some general confusion going on.  There is nearly always general confusion going on at aid stations, between the volunteers yelling out what's in their cups, the runners yelling what they'd like to drink, and people throwing the cups on the ground, along with their GU packets, etc. (not to worry, this is expected behavior and there are clean up crews at the aid stations as well), and the cheerleaders, and bands, and random men in hula-girl aprons and grass skirts. 

I'm listing this as "Things to do in San Diego," although technically the race was north of San Diego, in Carlsbad (in case you missed that in the race title), home to Lego Land.  (As an aside, I've never been to Lego Land because it is ridiculously expensive, especially if you're not bringing along a kid to get the full experience of the place). 

If you are a runner, or a walker, and want a good reason to escape the winter, come to San Diego, complete this race, and then vacation for the next few days.  The race started out cool, in the 50s, but by the time we made it to brunch, it was in the 70s.  Not bad for January.  And because the race is in January, you'll have to train through the holidays, which is helpful if you're not looking to gain 10 pounds in November and December.

And the race was well organized.  I've run races where aid stations have been un-staffed, races started late, there was no food at the finish line, and there were moose on the course (okay, that was actually pretty cool).  I would like to take a moment to offer a big e-shout out to all of the volunteers who were instrumental in making my race a success.  Seriously, there was an aid station at mile 1.  There were first aid volunteers cycling on the course.  There were lots of local bands and people playing music.  At one point there was a stream of surfers running across the course.  It was fantastic.  Oh, and did I mention that because it's an out-and-back, you'll see the Kenyans zoom past you on thier way in? 

One risk I will warn you of, just to present a balanced perspective, is that if you don't normally run in the 70s, or haven't had time to acclimate, it will feel hot.  So dress appropriately, shed layers, and don't feel bad about stopping to walk and admire the view. 

Then we went to brunch at The Ocean House Restaurant, which is housed in a building from the 1880s.  I love buffet brunch.  There was an omelet bar, where my aunt actually just ordered scrambled eggs, but I ordered an omelet with tomatoes, mushrooms, peppers, spinach, and cheddar cheese.  They also had meat and shrimp, but I'm weird about putting meat in eggs, unless it's a quiche.  I guess, more accurately, I'm inconsistent about putting meat in eggs.  There were many other breakfast items, including waffles, pancakes, cinnamon rolls, sausages, bacon, and fruit, along with a salad bar, a soup bar, a seafood bar (which my uncle took full advantage of, but something about shrimp and crab legs after running 13.1 miles was totally unappetizing to me), a meat station, and a variety of potatoes and vegetables.  And did I mention bottomless mimosas?

Sold!

The Marble Room

On Wednesday, a girlfriend (who as of yet does not have a character profile) and I went to The Marble Room for Restaurant Week.  I have eaten there several times already, because it is my go-to place when I want to take guests someplace for a nice meal, good drinks, live music, in an atmosphere that isn't a club or a lounge where everyone else is about 70 years our senior.  And they have really good tapas, which I love.  And the prices are reasonable (okay, for everyone who doesn't live in SoCal, you have to interpret "reasonable" here to mean "not exorbitant considering you're in a trendy area of San Diego").

And I realize that Wednesday does not equal Saturday (is there a way to type that sign in blogger?).  But Sunday I'm running the Carlsbad half marathon (there will be more on that later), and so my Saturday is going to consist of going to work (don't get me started on this), picking up my race packet and bib, and resting.  Not exactly riveting reading material.

I used to really love restaurant week because I felt like I could try out places I don't normally go.  And then Captain America started this schedule where he is at work until 10pm, and so any time we're both home at night seems like a good reason to go out and celebrate.  And I have enough friends.  I'm going to put a full stop there.  But what I really mean is that I have enough friends who like going out that I could probably suggest something new every weekend and at least one person would like to join me.  So, while the gimmick of restaurant week is losing its charm for me, dining out is not.

The Marble Room did what many restaurants do, which is they kept their regular menu for restaurant week and basically told you that you could have any appetizer, any entree, and a choice of a signature cocktail or a dessert. 

My girlfriend ordered the calamari, which was wonderful.  It is perfectly battered and fried, not too chewy and not too crispy, and it comes with three dipping sauces.  I had the Caprese salad, which I love, to begin with, and to which The Marble Room adds avocado, making it even better.  I have read that something magical happens when tomatoes and avocados are eaten together.  Somehow they compliment each other and some chemistry goes on and your body actually absorbs more nutrients than it would if you had eaten avocado and tomato at separate times in the day.  Not that I need an excuse to eat avocado. 

My girlfriend had the steak as her entree.  She ordered it medium-well, and it came out more like medium-rare.  I guess she didn't mind too much, since she didn't send it back.  She wasn't sure she'd like the sauce it came with, and our waitress told her she could have a different sauce, and so she ordered a side of all three.  One was spicy and I didn't try it.  One was a blue cheese reduction, and was very good, but was the least blue-cheesy looking sauce I have ever seen.  The third sauce was our favorite and was a brandy mushroom sauce. 

I ordered the wild mushroom ravioli, which I have also had before.  They are fantastic.  They come in almost a teriyaki sauce.  It has a little of that sweet/sour flavor but is thicker and darker.  Yum!

(These cookies are NOT whoopie pies)

For dessert, we ordered the whoopie pies and the chocolate peanut butter decadence.  The desserts were also very good, but I have to say, the more time I spend baking, the pickier I become about restaurant desserts.  I don't know if I could have made the exact same thing, and my presentation skills still leave something to be desired, but I definitely could have made something that tasted as good as the chocolate peanut butter decadence (although I couldn't have made the hazelnut gelato that accompanied it.  Which is fine because I don't like hazelnut anyway), and my whoopie pies were a little dry, although to be fair, I've never had a whoopie pie before and so maybe they were supposed to be that way.  I wanted to try them because I've been thinking about making some.  Depending on the size, they look just like the macarons we had in Switzerland, but absolutely are not.  So, I might not be making them.

The singer they had on Wednesday had a very Cheryl Crow-like sound, which was nice.

In conclusion I'd still recommend The Marble Room for tapas, dinner, drinks, and live music, but for dessert, come to my house!

It's 80 degrees here in January!

As much as it's been raining here lately (and coming from Oregon, I feel like I am an acceptable judge of what is a reasonable amount of rain and what is the amount that makes you want to crawl back under the covers until May), the fact that it has been 80 this weekend has boosted this from a good weekend to a fantastic weekend.

We are having a potluck on Friday at work for two people who are leaving my company.  They are both vegetarians.  Usually, I bring dessert to this sort of thing, but I really haven't been in the mood to bake lately, so I thought I'd bring something vegetarian in a crock pot.  I found a mac and cheese recipe, courtesy of a friend who LOVES her crock pot.  But the recipe says it's intense, so I figured I'd better try it out on some friends (I was offering wine in the bargain, so, really, how bad could the evening be?).  I invited some girlfriends over on Friday, and we had a great time catching up, drinking sangria, and eating mac and cheese and bread pudding.  The only "intense" thing about the recipe is that every 20 minutes or so you have to stir it.  You are using a bunch of dairy products, and you don't want them to curdle.  I doubled the pasta and left the rest of the recipe as is, and everyone loved it.  I loved that it was a homemade meal, but I really didn't do a whole lot of work, so I got to enjoy having guests over, too.

On Saturday, I got up bright and early because I had a running club to attend in Carlsbad.  I ran 9 miles as my taper for the Carlsbad half marathon next weekend, which meant, as far as I am concerned, that I was completely entitled to my burger and margarita at Rock Bottom with a girlfriend.  Then we went to Nails 2000 in UTC and had gel manicures.  Somehow, the process involves UV light and to harden the polish, so it doesn't chip.  My girlfriend had it done two weeks ago and had no chips, only her nails had grown.  So far I've washed dishes without gloves, and zipped my fly (you know how damaging a metal zipper can be to a good mani).  The real test will be weight lifting with my trainer on Tuesday.  The reviews I read of the place were actually not so good, but I trusted my friend, and I had no issues.  This is a more expensive mani than I usually go for (especially considering I have a friend who will do it for free), but I am REALLY hard on my hands, so if it lasts, it will be money well spent.  

I am slightly concerned about the UV light, but I wear hand lotion with sunscreen, and I live in California, so on the one hand I try to be pretty careful, and on the other, I'm bound to get some sort of skin cancer at some point, so I seriously doubt that my occasional manicure is really what's going to tip that scale.

This same girlfriend is, sadly, leaving my company.  She found a position in a totally different field, and we are all really excited for her, and we're going to miss her, but ever the optimists, we thought this would be the perfect excuse for a "boozy brunch" at Gringo's in PB.  They are apparently updating their website, so I've linked it to the yelp site, but they have a $16 brunch, and $4 bottomless mimosas, which may be cause for celebration by itself.  Including tax and tip, it works out to about $25 per person.  I had never been to Gringo's before, and was a little concerned when a friend described it as "Mexican breakfast," but they had normal breakfast items and some Mexican choices.  I was going to try my first tamale, but Mexican food is not my favorite, and when I opened the lid on the buffet line the overwhelming scent of corn stopped me in my tracks.  As far as I can tell, a tamale is stuff wrapped in a leaf.  It was probably good, but this was just a culinary adventure for which I was unprepared to embark.  However, everything I did eat was fantastic.  We were there three hours, so I think we totally go our money's worth of mimosas, too. 

Black Swan and fondue

This weekend, some girlfriends and I went and saw Black Swan.  I don't know what to make of the movie.  I didn't like it, but I didn't dislike it.  At first, I thought Nina was schizophrenic, but then one of my girlfriends thought maybe she had continued doing drugs, which makes sense after the costume manager comments that she'd lost weight (how that is possible, I don't know).  We also weren't sure if every time Nina saw Lily and it morphed into herself, if she was really seeing Lily and imagining she was that person, or if she was hallucinating herself.  (Wow, and after re-reading that paragraph, I'm sure I just confused all of you.)

Also, there was a lot of crotch-touching in the movie.  To me, that's a really non-subtle way of expressing sexuality, which is what the black swan is supposed to embody.  However, I don't really think of ballerinas as "sexy."  For one, they have no curves.  Secondly, they move with a precision I just don't equate with sexuality. 

Okay, and one more thing about the movie: is anyone else floored by how little ballerinas eat and still have energy to do anything?  Half a grapefruit and one poached egg does not equal a meal in my world, let alone enough to sustain someone for a day of dancing!  Good Lord!  Maybe ballerinas wouldn't be so catty if they had a little more food in them.  I know I'm less pleasant to be around when I'm hungry.

Which brings me to the next part of the evening!  The Melting Pot!  After the movie, we figured the best way to recover from the horrors of watching Natalie Portman turn into a swan would be to consume an excessive amount of cheese and chocolate!

We had a reservation for 7:30, but we arrived early, so we headed to the bar, where I had a Yin & Yang martini, which comes with chocolate shavings and is fabulous, one girlfriend had a glass of the "red" wine, which was some sort of Spanish table wine, and another girlfriend had the espresso martini with a double shot.  It tasted like an iced coffee.

We started our meal with the spinach and artichoke cheese blend, which comes with three types of cubed bread, green apples, and some mixed veggies.  The cheese usually comes in an amount to serve two, and then you can add on people, which is what we did.  I think the bread/veggies/apples are pre-portioned amounts, but the staff will gladly bring you more if you run out.

My girlfriends both ordered salads.  I do not like salads.  I just can't get into them.  There's always so much lettuce and I don't know, so little of what I'd actually like to be eating.  One girlfriend had the California salad, which she seemed to enjoy, and the other had the salad nicoise.  The only complaint she made was that her olives were mushy.

And then, of course, we moved on to dessert.  We had "the original," which is milk chocolate with a spoonful of peanut butter.  But we were feeling bold and daring, and had half milk, half dark chocolate, which was great, because it was less sweet than the milk chocolate, but not as bitter as dark chocolate would have been.

The evening proved to be a bit of an emotional roller coaster, between the intensity of the movie, followed by the deliciousness of cheese and the decadence of chocolate.  Not a bad way to spend a Saturday night!

The first weekend of 2011: #3, 12, 13, 24, 28

I was planning on making this weekend mellow, but mellow for me is apparently pretty busy. On the one hand, I thought it might be kind of lame if I said I was going to sit around reading, but the reality was, this was the first weekend where I didn't have to bake something, or be somewhere, or entertain a guest, or attend a party, or get dressed for that matter, in a while. So I was looking forward to sitting around.

But then Running Buddy texted and wanted to know if I wanted to do something, and I sort of have a policy of saying YES! to things unless I already have something else going on. (As much as I love reading, I'm certain if I were diagnosed with a terminal disease and told I had six months to live, I would not spend it reading every good book out there. I would spend it traveling and visiting friends and family. And if that's what I'd do if I KNEW I was going to die, that's what I should do now, since, guess what? I'm going to die. Sometime. Hopefully not for another 40-50 years or so.)

Anyway, Running Buddy and I met up at the Target in Mission Valley, and headed over to Cabrillo. Cabrillo is a national monument at the very southern tip of Point Loma. It has bathrooms with the best view ever. Of course, you can get the same view when you're not in the bathrooms, too. The monument has some very nice tidal pools, which we didn't actually get to play in because apparently Cabrillo is the place to go on New Year's day, and EVERYONE was there, so it was crowded. Not crowded by Sea World standards, just crowded for an out-of-the-way national monument.

We did get to go up in the lighthouse, which I love. It's this tiny little old light house and it's completely cramped inside, and I LOVE IT. And, it has a basement! You can't go in the basement, but you can see that it's there. Not a lot of houses in California have basements, which means everything that is basement-y is in your garage. I would say there are no basements because the ground shakes, but that's pretty dumb considering that parking garages and the like are located underground.

One thing I should inform you about going to Cabrillo is that you'll be driving along the road to get there, and it looks like you've come to a gate, and you might worry that they won't let you in. BUT IT'S ALL A LIE! There is no one at the gate, and you are totally allowed in. I promise. Then, you will drive through the naval base located on Point Loma, and really, you're still allowed to do this. And then you'll drive through the military cemetery, and this is okay, too. And then you'll come to the entrance to the national monument. It's bizarre, yes, but Point Loma is exactly that--a long, skinny point, so there's no civilian road and military road. There's just one road. Relax. You'll be fine, and the views are totally worth it.

On our drive out of Point Loma, we were treated to a lovely sunset. Unfortunately, the park closed before the sun actually set, but it's still lovely from the drive.

We decided to head over to Old Town for dinner. Old Town is a historic section of San Diego with a lot of Mexican restaurants and funky shops, as well as a state historic park. It's great for wandering around during the day, and is located on the trolley line, so it's easy to get to from down town.

We opted for dinner at Miguel's, which just recently changed its name from Zocalo. In fact, I think the web address still has Zocalo in it. They served us these fabulous warm, salty chips, and I ordered some guacamole to go with it. Because we were there during happy hour, I took advantage of those savings and also ordered two fish tacos and a strawberry margarita. My total came to just about as much as Running Buddy's, who only ordered the fajitas. She got a TON of food, though. Unlike many other establishments in Old Town, Miguel's has its own parking lot. Old Town does have many free parking lots, but they usually fill up quickly.

It was a fabulous Saturday afternoon, and next time, the only things we'd do differently is we'd start earlier and we'd bring a camera!

Captain America and I finally had a day off together on Sunday, so after puttering around the house and watching football (I'm pretty sure you can figure out which one of us did which of those things) we decided to go on what Captain America calls a spontaneous date.

We went over to Pickup Stix, which may sound like a ghetto date, but I LOVE their noodles, and they are located close to the movie theater that's closest to our house (and yes, the movie theater is a little ghetto, too). We went and saw True Grit. I am not a Jeff Bridges fan, but the movie was quite good. He plays a drunk, like always, but Matt Damon is very good (when isn't he good?), and Haylee Steinfeld was fantastic. There were some funny bits, and I actually cried at the end. (Spoiler alert: the horse dies. I'm a sucker for that sort of thing).

All in all, it was a wonderful, relaxing, but not dull weekend.