Some New Whirls From MyKitchen

Most of you probably know that I like to cook. Usually I cook every evening for my family, and usually it's a dinner made from scratch - with the exception of most Fridays that I have declared to junk food Fridays. Sundays are very low key as well. But apart from that, I cook, and usually I love it. I would even say I'm a pretty darn good cook.

Every other Thursday we meet with our German friends. We always meet in someone's home and everybody brings something to eat. Sometimes I bake bread and make Obatzter, sometimes I let Trader Joe's cook (meaning I throw some prepared food in the oven) and sometimes I try something new. It really depends on my mood.

A few weeks ago I made sun-dried tomato and Parmesan whirls for the first time. When I try a recipe for the first time I follow it to the book. After that I add my alterations. This one turned out not quite the way I had hoped, but it was still delicious, and therefore I present to you my very own version.

You will need:

1 package puff pastry (the all-butter sheets)
1 jar sun-dried tomatoes
2 cups grated Parmesan cheese
1 egg

Drain the sun-dried tomatoes and dice. Roll the pastry into a thin rectangle (you will actually get two of them) and evenly cover with the diced tomatoes, leaving a bit of space at the edges. Sprinkle Parmesan cheese on top of the tomatoes.

Beat the egg. Brush one long edge of the pastry with the egg and roll up the pastry into a log from the opposite side. "Glue" together. Transfer the rolled up pastry to a baking sheet and refrigerate for one hour.

After one hour, take the logs out of the fridge and brush with the beaten egg (I put the egg back into the fridge as well). Cut the logs in 0.5" wide slices (this is the messy part). Place these on a cookie sheet and brush with the remaining egg (yes, that one egg goes a long way!).

The whirls are baked in the oven at 400° F for 30 minutes, until they are golden brown. The whirls can be served warm or cold.

Enjoy!

This Squirrel is Ready to Kill

They look so innocent, don't they? So cute, with their big eyes and those sweet little faces. They are so funny and entertaining to watch when they chase each other up and down the trees.

So so cute...

They are smart - too smart sometimes. Especially when they are looking for food. The bird feeders are no problem for them - they eat upside down if it has to be, no matter how uncomfortable that might be. And if they fall down, they simply get up again.

And when the bird feeders are empty? The squirrel is still hungry. So what does the smart squirrel do? S/he looks for other food sources.

They love sunflower seeds.

There are sunflowers in my garden. Let me rephrase that - there WERE sunflowers in my garden. Not as many as last year since the birds (and probably the squirrels as well) picked the seeds after I had put them in the ground. There weren't that many that they overlooked. But the few that actually made it into flowers were gorgeous.

I loved them.

So did the squirrels.

There wasn't a single sunflower that wasn't "killed" by the squirrels. When I saw the first "victimized" sunflower - or what was left of it - lying on the ground, I had no idea what had happened and I actually thought it was the skunks or the raccoons that frequent our garden almost every night. But then I saw a squirrel sitting at the base of a huge sunflower, looking up at the flower head and quickly racing up the stem, putting the plant to the ground - and taking off with the flower head. This happened within seconds.

I was speechless. Those flower heads were huge! Squirrels - not so much.

It was a quick and daring kill. As mad as I was, I also admired those little fearless beasts for their courage. I suspect that in this drought they are probably desperate for food.

The next thing I did was taking my camera and taking pictures of the remaining sunflowers before they became victims of my "sweet little innocent looking" friends.

None of the sunflowers has survived. And if there were a few left because the squirrels were going for the biggest flower heads, I took them inside and put them in a vase.

A very different sunflower year.

Music in the Streets

Street music is something I love - it gives a town or city a certain flair if there are musicians out in the streets entertaining others with their musical talent.

Street music can be seen - pardon me, heard! - in many places in Europe. It's something that just belongs to city streets and plazas, and it's not only for warm summer days when the living is easy. More often than not you find street musicians at Christmas markets all over Germany when the temperatures are barely hovering over the freezing point.

But I digress. Today I want to show you some of the street musicians we came across during our trip in Europe, mainly in Great Britain and Paris. There weren't that many in Hameln, Germany while we were there - probably because it was a regular week day and not a Saturday when there are more crowds. There also weren't that many in Amsterdam which surprised me a little bit.

However, this guy in Edinburgh played his beautiful bagpipe melodies even though it was raining and not many people stopped to listen to him. He was fully dressed in tartan and quite the sight.

In London, we met another bagpipe player in Trafalgar Square who tried to make his music heard in all the traffic. Not an easy job! He didn't seem to be very concerned though and kept his British calm.

Walking along the South Bank was quite the sound experience. There were so many street musicians, and sometimes their music mixed when you had just left one of them and approached the next one. It could be a rather interesting mix sometimes with all the different kinds of music.

These guys were also flirting with Kaefer while playing their joyful tunes. It actually was fun!

And he was my favorite.

The most music though you can hear in the long passageways of the tube, the underground transportation in London. The acoustics down there are fabulous and you already hear the music when you either enter the station from the street or when you disembark ("alight" as the English call it) a train. It's something I always associate with London.

Paris, on the other hand, didn't have much music in the metro, but there were tons of street musicians everywhere. A saxophonist at the Champs de Mars near the Tour Eiffel...

...and a guitarist at the Centre Pompidou.

Not far from him there was this a cappella choir whose singing we enjoyed a lot.

And so did this little girl while sitting on her dad's shoulder and holding the flowers (for her mom?). Isn't she adorable?

A cappella seems to be quite popular in Paris, because the same day we saw another choir who sang in a courtyard in the oldest part of Paris, the Marais.

Of course most of the street musicians we met in the Quartier Latin, where the university is found and life is loud and vibrant. The music was a broad mix of everything you could think of - I enjoyed walking along the streets and alleys and discovering new bands all the time.

Now let's get dancing, just like this old lady in this photo!

Always Something New in the Royal City (August Break 2014)

London seemed to be one gigantic construction zone - especially in the City (the financial district), but also in other parts - and often old and new are right next to each other. Above in the picture you can see the construction of new hyper-modern buildings around old St. Paul's Cathedral.

Old buildings, new buildings - this is the 21st century reality of London. It could be horrible. However, the modern architects are doing quite a fine job. I actually like the stark contrast between new and old. I find it rather inspiring.

The view from Tower Bridge to the Tower of London (founded in 1066!) and behind it, "the Gherkin" - one of my favorite modern buildings.

Or look at this - "the Shard", another favorite. It looks unfinished, but it's complete. The architect of this skyscraper is Renzo Piano - the same guy who built the Centre Pompidou in Paris (together with Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini), the New York Times Building and the California Academy of Sciences. It is 87 storey and 306 meters (1,004 ft.) high and has an observation deck which we unfortunately did not visit. It is currently the tallest building in the European Union.

If you look to the bottom right corner of the next photo you can see one of the gates to the Tower of London. It does look small compared to the huge buildings in its neighborhood.

I do think that most of the modern buildings have style - they're inspiring. It's modern architecture at its best - creative, innovative, interesting. Here you can see the "Gherkin" again, hiding behind other buildings.

The view from the London Eye - quite impressive, don't you think?

This modern side of London is for Susannah Conway's prompt "Something new" for the August Break 2014.

I Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet

Do you know this Carole King song? The title of the song became reality for us this past weekend. At 3:20 on Sunday morning precisely.

I had just woken up when seconds later I heard a rambling that grew louder, and the house started to shake, becoming more violent the longer it took. Both the Geek and I lay in our bed motionless until finally the spook stopped after a very long 20 seconds.

My first highly intelligent words were "Holy moly". And they were loud. Then we saw a bright flash outside, like some very strong lightning. Our first thought, of course, was our daughter, and we rushed across the landing to her room - I saw our big glass lamp over the staircase swinging from side to side. Kaefer had woken up during the shaking and rattling, "was that an earthquake?", when the second flash hit.

Of course we thought our power had gone out as it happens so often after an earthquake of that magnitude.

But to our surprise, we still had power; other neighborhoods in our city had not. The Geek then went around the house, looking for gas and water leaks. Nothing. We were more than grateful.

Our next move was to go to the USGS website and find out where the earthquake's epicenter was and how big it was. All we knew by then was that it was a bigger earthquake, bigger than anything we had felt in California so far (the biggest being 4.3) and also bigger than the earthquake I rode through while I was living in Taiwan in the early eighties, which was a 5.6 and pretty scary for me at that time (that one had also happened during the night).

The epicenter was in American Canyon which is about 25-30 miles from our home, as the crow flies. Its magnitude hit 6.0 on the Richter scale, some even say 6.1. A magnitude 6 temblor has a seismic energy yield of 15 kilotons, the equivalent of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. In other words, it is very powerful.

Napa was the place that was hit the hardest. Damage is estimated to be up to $ 1 billion. Fortunately, there weren't any deaths and only a handful of people who were seriously injured. We were lucky. This time.

Given that both Napa and Sonoma Counties are wine country, there was a lot of wine spilled. I know of stores in Napa that remained closed because every single wine bottle had fallen off the shelf. Some tourists were so spooked that they cancelled their wine tours and tastings, and headed back east instead. But as they say here - the show goes on.

As I already mentioned, we were lucky. If you live in California you know that the earth can move and shake under your feet, without any forewarning. Many of us are aware that the BIG ONE will happen sometime in the next 30 years - that can be next week, in five years or in twenty. We don't know. We only know that this one wasn't IT. Although it was the biggest earthquake in the Bay Area since the Loma Prieta earthquake (6.9) 25 years ago.

But we can be prepared. We have an emergency kit in our garage that contains a lot of water and food plus our camping gear (let's just hope the garage doesn't collapse). Batteries, flashlights, a radio. Blankets and a big tent.

I hope we will never need it.

Adornment (August Break 2014)

Before this day is over I want to offer my adornment.

Honestly, I wasn't even sure what adornment meant. Thankfully, Susannah Conway sends out emails every day of her August Break 2014 and thus I got an idea about adornment. She was talking about adorning oneself, followed by a few examples.

So, how do I adorn myself? I rarely wear make up, I put my hair up in a ponytail or messy bun, and my clothes are anything but fashionable. I love comfortable, sometimes a bit crazy clothes, color and nothing trendy.

But I have a thing for earrings. I love them. I have quite a collection, but usually I wear these ones:

The Geek gave them to me on Christmas a couple years ago. I had seen them at a holiday fair, made by an artist from San Francisco (unfortunately I lost her card). Immediately I fell for this style... and my husband saw how much I loved them. I was very happy when I found them under the Christmas tree, and I have worn them almost every day since then.

No lipstick, no eye shadow, no mascara - but these earrings are a must!

What is your favorite adornment?

Autumn Foreshadow (August Break 2014)

I had promised that I would get back to August break - after I had missed so many. Today's prompt is "shadow" - I didn't take a new photo for this, and I also don't show a picture from Europe as I did with all the other August break prompts. This photo was taken four years ago, during a leisurely drive through our wine country - I actually found this image in my "fences" folder.

My favorite season is coming up - I can't wait for the warm and golden colors of fall. Some of our trees are already starting to change color, like the Chinese Pistache. It seems early - I guess it is due to the lack of water in our third straight year of drought. The Japanese Maple in front of our house is still green, though - it usually is at its height of fierce red color in November.

Are you looking forward to autumn or are you holding on to summer?