Quod subigo farinam

 

Looking back, the blog has been getting just a tad deep and meaningful, which is fine; but only in moderation, I feel. It’s probably time to talk about more frivolous things. For instance, I think the cat might like classical music. She’s usually hiding under the bed at this point in the day, or sleeping on Stacey’s pillow. Today, though, it’s a relatively tranquil and pleasant day in Cayucos and instrumental music helps me write, because their words don’t get in the way of mine. So this morning the cat is dozing on the sofa, quite clearly listening to Beethoven’s 9th. She’s obviously a cat with hidden depths.

We (Stacey and I, not me and the cat) went to SLO farmers’ market this week, which is not unusual, but instead of getting street food from the many, many, many vendors we got Buffalo Chicken pizza from a great little local shop. And there, in between watching the baseball on TV and trying to make up food-related names for baseball teams (Baltimore Oreos, Chicago Subs, Cilantro Blue Jays…..) we started wondering why pizza is one of those things which, 99% of the time, somebody else cooks for you, whether it’s take-away, frozen or in a restaurant.

It boils down to two main reasons. Firstly, home-made pizza is generally very disappointing. Getting the base crispy is damn nigh impossible because you have to put wet ingredients onto raw dough and leave it there long enough for the topping to cook through. Secondly, it’s an absolute arse to make. There are many components which have to come together at once, cooking with yeast is a trial at the best of times and you need about 3 hours from starting to make the dough to sitting down to eat.

My reaction to the very American solution to the home-made-pizza dilemma was one of disbelief. It can’t possibly work. There are so many things which are bound to go wrong. It doesn’t make sense. Whoever came up with it must have been stoned or drunk or both. It’s lunacy; it’s the most ridiculously counter-intuitive idea since bungee jumping. There is just no way you can barbecue a pizza. Here’s how.

You need two things pre-made before you start. I’ll tell you all about one of them- pizza dough- later. The other is a decent pizza sauce. This recipe is fail-safe:

Half an onion
Three cloves of garlic
Olive oil
1 tin of tomatoes
1tsp oregano
1tsp basil
little bit of cayenne pepper.

Fry the chopped onion and garlic for about 2 minutes in olive oil. Add the herbs and stir through; allow to cook for another minute or so, before adding the tomatoes. Bring this all to the boil. Liquidise the whole lot until it’s smooth enough to spread with the back of a spoon. You might want to return it to the pan and reduce the sauce to a thicker paste if there’s too much liquid; use your own judgement.

Now to the barbecuing of the pizza:

First: Preheat the gas grill for fifteen minutes. The grill needs to be very hot and as clean as humanly possible. Roll out your pizza dough (more about this later) thinly. Brush one side with olive oil and put it, oiled-side down, on the grill. Lower the lid. It needs barely three minutes to take a bit of colour (see left) before you remove it from the grill.

It is this browned side you’re going to put your topping on. Unlike raw dough, it won’t go soggy when exposed to sauce.

 

Then: Rub the raw side with olive oil. This raw, oiled side will be the bottom of the finished pizza and will cook at the same time as the topping. The olive oil adds flavour and stops it sticking to the grill.

-This is the bit I didn’t believe would happen. I thought there was no way you could prevent dough from sticking to hot metal. But it works, honest.

 

 

 

After that: Turn the pizza base over so it’s grilled-side up. Spread it with sauce and arrange your chosen toppings on top. Ours had spicy beef (beef mince cooked with garlic and chilli powder), Italian sausage, peppers, onions and cheese.

Remember your toppings have to cook quickly. Whatever you’re putting on, cut it thinly. Grate cheese finely rather than coarse. The topping should be no thicker overall than the base, roughly speaking, otherwise there will be too much water in it and it won’t cook before the dough burns.

Lastly: Return your pizza to the grill. It will have to spend longer on the grill this time in order to cook the top, but the dough on the bottom will cook just as fast. You will therefore probably have to reduce the temperature of the grill. If you find the dough is cooked but the cheese still needs finishing off, put the pizza on the warming rack, where the heat is less fierce, to make sure the topping is cooked properly.

 

 

Now, while we have a delicious home-made pizza, crispy of base and melty of cheese, perfect in many ways, you may have noticed that I’ve totally glossed over the solving of the second problem with making pizza at home: making pizza dough is a pain in the arse. Not only that, but making good pizza dough is the work of a genius; certainly far beyond me. I can make a disc of tough bread which has the ballistic properties and mouth feel of Kevlar. But just because you could theoretically top it with meat and cheese doesn’t mean you should do so. Now, in the UK you can buy pre-made, part-baked, so-called pizza bases. Frankly, don’t. Buy a frozen one. It’s cheaper, by the time you’ve bought topping ingredients, and it’ll be better. Here, there’s the vastly superior option of buying vacuum-packed fresh dough. This works well on the barbecue. We did neither- we used a bread-maker.

It’s cheating, I know, and not everyone has got one. But they are wonderful things, if you can get a high enough level of use out of it to make it worthwhile. Frankly, we do. It’s $4 here for a loaf of bread you’d want to eat, and you can still pay more than that for one you wouldn’t. There’s a certain argument that there is a certain nobility of purpose in baking one’s own bread. It’s a fair argument, I suppose, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to be able to eat sandwiches made of the stuff. Home-made bread is nearly always too dense, for several reasons: it’s rarely warm enough for dough to rise to its full extent within realistic domestic time limits; it’s hard to find a place whose temperature is consistent enough to allow it to do so; kneading for 10 minutes is damn hard work and anyone who says it’s not is either lying or not kneading hard enough. There is also the necessity, when working dough with the hands, of adding more flour to the hands, dough and work surface to stop it sticking. This flour starts to add up eventually, and it makes the finished loaf very heavy. The bread maker maintains constant temperatures, kneads effortlessly and consistently, and there are only 2 pieces to clean. You put ingredients in, wander off and wander back once it goes beep.

Not only does our bread maker make ordinary bread and pizza dough, but it allows me to muck about with more exotic stuff- pictured left is last week’s effort. There’s a story to it.

In our kitchen lives our newest pet. It has no name, but if it were to have one, The Thing or Cousin It would probably be a good place to start. It bubbles, has its own moods, is fed daily, produces alcohol and is allergic to metal. It’s a symbiotic culture of  Lactobacillus Sanfranciscensis and yeast, known to the world of cookery as a sourdough starter. The yeast leavens the bread, while the lactobacillus both protects the yeast from chemical damage, and lends the bread you bake with it a distinctive firm, open texture and pleasantly sour flavour.

As you might guess from the name, L. Sanfranciscensis is a California native; it is the foundation of San Francisco Sourdough bread. It first started being used by people to leaven bread during the gold rush era. Getting supplies from anywhere to the goldfields was a royal pain in the neck, and you could forget perishable goods like bread. So the miners had to bake their own. You feed a sourdough starter every day, and although you remove some of it daily, it self-renews. Ideal when you’re in a cabin, in a canyon, excavating for a mine. In fact, in the goldfields, I am told, the miners mostly ate thick pancakes made light and fluffy with the stuff. We tried this last weekend and they are really very addictive indeed. They also used to skim the alcoholic liquid off the top to drink. There’s is no way on Earth I’m going to do that.

Having been given a packet of the freeze-dried starter culture, manufactured by this appropriately-named San Jose company, it now sits on top of the highest surface in the kitchen in an airtight container to keep the fumes in, all the while developing a deeper character and gradually growing sourer as the L. Sanfranciscensis culture becomes more established. In fact, I think I’ll call it Frank. I wonder if he likes Beethoven.

The Rockets’ Red Glare

 

When people have asked me, recently, whether or not this was my first Fourth of July, I’ve told them of course it wasn’t. It was my twenty-seventh Fourth of July, it was just the first time I’d seen people making such an almighty fuss over it.

Independence Day is fun. While Thanksgiving is typically American through its sentimentality, with its focus on hearth, home and family (and turkey), the Fourth finds its American-ness in its bombastic, extrovert, in-your-face, up-your-nose and down-your-throat attitude. If Thanksgiving is about motherhood and apple pie, the Fourth of July is about fireworks, hot dogs and beer. And frankly, as is so often the case here, if you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t have joined.

Local celebrations should be taken with a respectably large pinch of salt. If you dig too much into the history of these things, which one is apt to do as an outsider, it unravels spectacularly and you don’t get the best out of the celebration. In Catholic parts of Germany- the West and the South- the beginning of Lent is celebrated with parades, parties and copious amounts of alcohol, very much like Mardi Gras.

I remember seeing pupils, from a school that I worked at, parading through the streets  during Karneval, as it is called in western Germany, as part of their local scout troop and all dressed as penguins.They waved their flippers at us, and we teachers waved back, and then we went to the pub. If one tried to explain this beginning with the story of Jesus having to go into the wilderness for forty days, and continued via an explanation of the ritual habits of medieval European Catholics, you will almost certainly lose the narrative thread between there and the point at which a bunch of ten-to-fourteen-year-olds parade through the centre of Limburg-an-der-Lahn, dressed as penguins .

Similarly, getting hung up on the historical background of Independence Day gets you nowhere much.  Congress voted for the independence of the thirteen colonies on July 2nd, 1776. This point is one which, today, is somewhat moot. Even if not-President-quite-yet John Adams wrote to his wife:

“The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”

Whoops. I’m personally devastated for the bloke. If you look at what he thought should happen, he’s absolutely bang on the money, 225 years later. But the only reason we remember this letter now is because he was two days out. You can almost hear Adams’ ghost screaming down the centuries “It was two days, two and a quarter centuries ago, you pedantic bastards!”. Or something.

What IS a slightly entertaining fact, if you are apt to be entertained by such things (in which case, welcome to the Dork Squad; we have t-shirts) is that Adams died on the fourth of July 1826, exactly fifty years (and two days) after Congress declared independence from Great Britain, and exactly fifty years after they approved the Declaration of Independence. Not only that, but his great friend and rival, Thomas Jefferson, spent the same day doing exactly the same thing, i.e. dying. Not only that, but they had been the only two signatories of the Declaration of Independence who later became President of the United States.

But this, while geekily pleasing to know, is useless on the day itself unless you want people to raise their eyebrows at you, and edge slowly away. The celebration of the Fourth of July has very little to do with the reasons to founders broke away from Britain. The day is not spent debating the meaning of liberty, decrying the excesses of absolute monarchy and denouncing taxes found to be unjust. Except possibly for the last one, but it sometimes seems that pretty much all taxation is seen as unjust in America; hardly a day goes by without somebody having a good old denounce.

In America, today, as Adams predicted, it’s a holiday spent the way a Summer holiday should be spent. His prediction was pretty darn accurate. For instance, Cayucos Community Church advertised their “Festival of Freedom, including ‘God Bless America’” for weeks in advance. There are parades held nationwide, one starting at the end of our street. The population of Cayucos goes from 3,000 to 30,000 over that weekend, as visitors come from more parade-deprived areas to get a look at ours here.

Having an opportunity to get the hell out of Dodge before it all went completely mad, we did so. We spent it at the cabin we were married at, by a usually tranquil lake which was packed with boats all trying hard to avoid one another. It was 35°C (95°F) and the chance to swim was a welcome one, even if it meant swimming through the waves created by the wakes of an unusual amount of lake traffic. There was a boat parade on the lake, however, and as you can see, some folks got deeply into the spirit of the thing.

The cabin was dolled up to the nines with flags and banners, and we baked a pretty good berry cake, which was photographed going into the oven, and looking decidedly more patriotic than when it came out, and whose recipe was therefore not included (right). The lake was illuminated by a proverbially huge firework display, whose roars echoed and reverberated (is that a tautology? Possibly. I’m not sure I care.) from the surrounding mountains. The pictures are below; do enjoy. The one thing Adams missed off his list was barbecues. It’s the done thing. His ghost almost certainly approves. We had grilled hot dogs. We’re being a bit more adventurous this weekend with baby back pork ribs prepared overnight with the following dry rub recipe, lifted from Cook’s Illustrated American Classics:

Dry Rub for Barbecue

4 tbsp. sweet paprika
2 tbsp. chilli powder
2 tbsp. ground cumin
2 tbsp. dark brown sugar
2 tbsp. salt
1tbs dried oregano
1tbs granulated sugar
1tbs ground black pepper
1tbs ground white pepper
1-2tsp cayenne pepper

Mix all these together, and store in an airtight container. Rub the mixture into the surface of the meat and allow to marinate for at least one hour before cooking. For more flavour, rub it in the day before, cover the rubbed meat in cling film and put it in the fridge overnight.

July 4th 2011 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Nothing to fear but fear itself

 

Welcome back after a bit of a hiatus, during which Stacey actually went through with becoming Mrs Potts, for reasons best known to herself. It was a wonderful day but I won’t go into it in too much detail here, because, well, there are other things to talk about.

Getting the cabin ready for the wedding was bloody hard work. Much of it was done by other people, but I will admit to waving a duster around half-heartedly myself. As a reward for this strenuous labour Stacey persuaded me to take a day off and go with the redoubtable Morgan and Sam to Yosemite National Park. I’m frankly surprised she could spare the pair of them. Earlier in the week they competed in a local triathlon; 400m through the lake, freshly topped up with mountain snowmelt, then 12 miles up hill and down dale on a bike, and just in case they survived that they finished with a three mile run. All this at some ungodly hour of the morning. They finished competitively, and then Sam, either because the exertion had unbalanced him mentally or perhaps he just hadn’t hurt himself enough that day, spent the afternoon chopping wood with an axe, like a real man.

Now, were I to put my finely-honed machine of a body through a similar level of pain it would surely make me pay dearly for such hubris the next day. If either Sam or Morgan were feeling it, they didn’t show it. They got up and scraped several inches of leaves and pine needles off a few dozen yards of driveway, again, before the dew was off the grass. By this time I was suffering from some sort of inverted smugness at not having, say, built a small log cabin on the beach using only a paperclip and a jar of raspberry jam.

So come the next day they had thoroughly earned their day off. They took Iain and I, who hadn’t. Iain is my old mate from England, who had come to do his bit as best man at the wedding, and had never visited the States before. I must say, it was a lot of fun to see him go through new experiences. The look on his face when he was confronted by the menu in Taco Bell was particularly special.

So was his reaction to encountering Black Widow spiders. No spiders in the UK are even vaguely dangerous to humans, whereas a bite from a Black Widow (left) can be quite painful, and the desperately unlucky can encounter more serious problems. Iain was- how to put this- somewhat jumpy. In his defence, he got within a few inches of a Black Widow sitting in the shed, in order to film it on his iPhone. But thereafter, every log, every bush, plank, every crack in the pavement was inhabited, in his mind, by legions of spiders determined to take a chunk out of his leg. I found this rather funny until I remembered how I’d been when I found out that such things are a fact of life here. When I visited Stacey two years ago her mom squished six Black Widows she found hiding as she hosed off the patio furniture. I remember getting nervy every time I sat down outside. I would offer the fervent prayer “If I get bitten I’m going to have to tell people about it. Please, God make it the leg, and not the arse.”

When really, this was more than a little bit silly, because by all accounts you have to be trying quite hard to make a Black Widow bite you. Same goes for the Brown Recluse Spiders. Although a serious Brown Recluse bite will kill your flesh and make it rot (!!) (as graphically illustrated by slides 17 to 21 here- not for those who are squeamish, or eating, or a big girl’s blouse) you have to really, really provoke it to persuade it that you’re worth a nibble.

What I hadn’t known back then- and this is what Iain was going through now- is the answer to the question “How scared am I supposed to be?”. Are people going to laugh if I’m stupid enough to let a spider bite me, or could it happen to anyone? Will they try to poke the spot where it bit me just for laughs, or are they going to call 911 and ask me which church I go to so the can call a priest, just in case? What is an appropriate level of terror? If this is squeaky bum time, at exactly what pitch is one expected to squeak?

In Yosemite, when we got there, it was fantastically beautiful. Even by the park’s own ridiculously high standards, it was on top form. This year has been colder than usual, so the snow has waited until the last possible moment to melt, and it’s all coming down the mountain at once. You can see in the picture on the right, taken two weeks ago, the massive, roaring column of white water which is Bridal Veil Falls, which is barely visible on the 2009 photo on the left, which was, admittedly, taken a little later in the year. There are at the moment, we were told, waterfalls which haven’t been seen for thirty years, and which would likely be gone again in a matter of weeks. The valley was lush and green. Iain and Sam hadn’t seen Yosemite before, and were suitably impressed. In a meadow (below) surrounded on all sides by the most spectacular mountain scenery, Iain pointed out that  if the view available in any particular direction had been available in Britain people would have travelled across the country to see it, as they do to see Snowdonia, Glencoe or the Lake District. And here we were, in one small, relatively unremarkable area of the Yosemite valley, once again awe-struck by the panorama.

But the threat of being bitten in the bum by anything which might wish to oblige was never far from Iain’s mind. Yes, Morgan said, she had seen rattlesnakes before, but never in Yosemite. Which isn’t to say they aren’t there. They are, in fact the only venomous species of the 13 separate snake species which inhabit the park. Isn’t that nice? The National Park Service has this to offer:

“Fortunately, the likelihood of encountering one is relatively low. Pay attention when hiking or climbing in dry, rocky places. Avoid putting your hands in holes or on ledges where snakes may be sunning themselves. If you do see or hear one, simply detour around it or let the snake crawl away. Rattlesnakes are an important part of Yosemite’s ecosystem, as they help keep the park’s rodent numbers in check.”

Basically, if you’re bitten by a rattler, it seems to imply, it’s no more than you deserve for disturbing the sunbathing of an edgy and sociopathic loner armed with deadly venom. Also, if you’re a rabbit or a gopher, you’ve got it coming too, so consider yourself warned. However, Iain didn’t have this piece of helpful advice to hand, and was considerably reassured as a result, I’m sure.

I should say, at this point, that the attitude of the National Park Service towards the wildlife of the United States is a completely correct one. I only mock it from the point of view of a couple of urban foreigners whose experience with dangerous wildlife is limited to close encounters with frankly psychotic Gateshead pigeons. But then, as Iain put it, when we started on a trail towards Mirror Lake, he’s never before been on a walk where the landowner warned him about the dangers of being eaten by a big cat:

Iain took a photograph of the sign, and failed to be eaten by a mountain lion. Somewhat to his own disappointment, I feel. I got the distinct impression that as long as it made YouTube, Iain was prepared to lose anything up to and including half a hand or foot in the cause of seeing cool stuff.

Bears present their own set of problems to the human who encounters them. Spiders and snakes almost have to be forced to bite a human. You have to disturb them or touch them. Mountain lions, too, although unpredictable, are relatively shy. Loud noises along the trail will tend to (usually, not always) make them avoid you, so you don’t have to avoid them. Bears are different.

Anyone who has read Winnie the Pooh (and if you’ve only seen the Disney version, I can’t tell you how much you’re missing out- it’s like only ever having drunk decaf coffee- read the books) knows, because it is a carefully-observed treatise on ursine behaviour, that bears like their food, and have even been known to become stuck in rabbit holes having gorged themselves on too much condensed milk.

So it follows, that most real-life human-bear conflict starts as a confrontation over food. The rubbish bins at the cabin have been known to undergo the odd inspection by bears looking for food. There are bear-proof containers all over Yosemite for the use of visitors; some are for waste, others are for food. You don’t, ever, ever keep your food in your tent when you’re camping. Keep it in your car, or a bear proof container. Because bears are opportunist omnivores. It goes completely against their nature to pass up the opportunity of harvesting readily-available food. A tent is only so much fabric to a bear: they’ll rip the bark off a tree to collect grubs. Imagine what they’d do to a tent to get an ice box full of ham sandwiches. Suddenly they’re in your tent, and you’re in the way of what are indubitably now THEIR sandwiches, and we’re off to the races, and now it’s time for your mauling.

Bears, therefore, will sometimes come and find you. But they are the most amazing things to see. We were exactly that lucky. Doing research for this post I found out that the NPS ask you to report all bear sightings, no matter what they’re doing or where they are, so I emailed them, and said the following:

“Hi,

I was researching bears for my blog having seen two in Yosemite National Park on Wednesday last week (8th June). Your Bear Facts page (you didn't call it Bear Essentials? So disappointed) asks readers to let you know about bear sightings. So I am. It was about 4.30pm and we were on the road towards Glacier Point. Downhill from the road, cub was scraping bark from a tree to eat insect larvae from beneath it, under the careful supervision of an adult bear, presumably its parent or cubsitter, who kept itself between the cub and the numerous park visitors who'd stopped to take photos. You might already know about this but if everyone thought that way, you'd never find out about any bears at all, and that would be sad.

Regards,

Richard”

There were thirty or so people taking photos of these bears. They, despite their colour, are American Black Bears; all the bears in California are Black Bears, despite the Brown Bear appearing on the state flag. According to Gary Brown, 91% of the Black Bears in Yosemite are brown or blond in colour.  The mother bear was watching the cub, and every now and then turning a casual eye upon us just to make sure that we were maintaining the safe distance between them and us, before returning her attention to what was clearly a practical lesson in grub harvesting. She- they- were about twenty yards away down the hill from the road. Nobody there was in the slightest bit scared or apprehensive. Iain’s camera wouldn’t focus on them properly, but if a crack team of Mountain Lions and Western Rattlesnakes, backed up by the 2nd battalion of the 13th Black Widow regiment had rushed our position, I doubt his attention would have been drawn away from the scene before us.

I sent my mam the pictures. She posed a question, and although her point was a moot one it was nevertheless relevant, three days before I was due to get married: “What if you’d been eaten?” I thought the question a bit daft at the time, but it could have happened. Black Bears can run at 35mph. Even uphill for the bear, with our car 60 yards away on the flat, it might have been a near-run thing; one I certainly wouldn’t have wished to bet my life on. But, quite honestly, the thought never entered our heads. I am fairly sure that that was true of everyone there. It was as if the mother bear had the situation under control for all of us. She wasn’t anxious or nervous, so we weren’t either. She was comfortable with her own cub there, and none of us were trying to get any closer- and how often can you say that about a crowd of snap-happy tourists. It was a perfectly harmonious moment.

A week later, we went back to the coast. We never really got onto the subject of sharks.

The Corn Chip Aisle

 

I arrived in America nearly three weeks ago I’ve been struggling to make the choice as to what to write about. I’ve had too many options.

For example, since achieving my temporary ambition of becoming a mix of house-husband and unemployed layabout, I have been walking on the beach at Cayucos once or twice a day. I have enjoyed the warm and blustery weather, as have the kite surfers and the fellas that zoom about on those kite buggy things. So I was going to write about beach sports but I have too much to learn yet to launch into the topic as if I know something. Perhaps later.

The wildlife has been a topic. For example, the Sherriff posted neon pink signs near all the beach access points this week reporting a shark sighting, and telling people to keep out of the water, which everybody, especially the kite surfers, promptly ignored. There was also what can only be regarded as an incident involving photos of a dead skunk being eaten by a Turkey Vulture, which I posted on Facebook (the photos, not the Vulture, were posted, for those of you allergic to dangling modifiers.) One friend, in an outburst of extraordinarily narrow-minded vitriol, called me a “sicko” and asked if I’d been affected by “the Americans” already. Well, you know who you are, and I’m telling “the Americans” you called them all names. Considering one of this friend’s dearest ambitions is to, as she put it, “rollerblade down Venice beach” you’d think she’d be a bit nicer to “the Americans.” She was just kidding, I’m sure. Personally, I’d pay hard cash to see her try and rollerblade on Venice beach. Perhaps a kite would help.

But there is nothing really HAPPENING to the wildlife here. There is wildlife. What more can you say? There will be an opportunity at some point to write about it and post some nice photos. But not yet. Another potential topic was the hedonistic debauchery of the Santa Maria Strawberry Festival, but I’d missed it by a week. I’d been looking forward to it; perhaps next year.

There were topics aplenty; but none of those which floated around in my head really seemed significant enough to be really gone into in depth as my first blog post from the New World, until several conversations I had had with various people started to string themselves together. Time and time again I had the same conversation with new acquaintances. If I could boil down and distill the essence of these conversations, it would go something like “How are you different to us?” And this question was asked out of enthusiasm and friendly curiosity, out of Americans’ desire to learn about America.

The more I talked about it, the more the topic of this post emerged. Newsflash, it should read, America is a foreign country. English speakers in today’s world might be fooled into thinking they know America, through pop culture and linguistic familiarity. We know they drive on the right here and don’t put a ‘u’ in ‘behavior’. But this, shock horror, is not all there is to it.

For instance, when Stacey’s cousin Tyler talked to me about guns, I did not feel in any way out of my depth. He knew we have gun control laws in the UK, and asked me if I had ever fired a gun, and if not, was it something I intended to do now I was here. Now, I know about the right to bear arms (which is not the same as this) being protected in the Bill of Rights. I know how, love them or not, guns have a place in the past history and present day culture of the United States in a way they don’t have in Britain. It was one of those nice, easy, obvious cross-cultural exchanges which I had already thought about and, although the topic was an emotive and polarising one whose basic principles are deeply rooted in the political philosophy and pragmatic needs of the eighteenth century, Tyler and I knew what we were still able to have a sensible conversation about it.

Contrast, if you will, the far less politically-charged issue of tortilla chips. We needed food, so we went to Albertsons in Morro Bay. In need of a maize-based salsa delivery mechanism, I headed to the snacks aisle to pick up a bag of Doritos.

Culture. Shock.

Instead of finding a supermarket aisle stacked neatly with crisps, cashews, pork scratchings, peanuts, pretzels, Pringles, corn chips, Twiglets, Wotsits, Quavers and Space Raiders, I was confronted with the Corn Chip Aisle. That’s all there was. An entire aisle devoted to salsa delivery technology.

Did I want triangular or round? Yellow, white or blue corn? Scooping or flat? Triangular or round? Salted, slightly salted, plain? Nacho cheese, chipotle, lime or sour cream flavours? Made with canola oil or sunflower oil? Oh, and which brand? I went into psychological meltdown at the overwhelming range of choice. How did I know, when I picked a bag up, it was the one I wanted? Was I sure? Did I not want salted, rather than slightly salted? Was I sure I was sure? I just wanted a bag of tortilla chips…

By the way, the crisps, cashews, pork scratchings, peanuts, pretzels, Pringles, corn chips, Twiglets, Wotsits, Quavers and Space Raiders or their American counterparts all had their own place under the hallowed roof of Albertsons.

The reasons that Albertsons in Morro Bay has a Corn Chip Aisle are at least as complex as gun control. Other Albertsons stores elsewhere in the U.S. will not sell as many different varieties because they serve communities with different needs and expectations. Clearly, Californians expect corn chips, and multitudes thereof. In Britain, we’d have maybe three different producers of corn chips available in a supermarket. Doritos, probably Kettle Chips, probably the supermarket’s own brand. Here, there is an aisle full. Isn’t it ironic that here of all places, a small producer can make a local impact without needing to fight against corporate monoliths? America’s big. There are a lot of people buying tortilla chips. They don’t all buy Doritos.

So what have we learned today, class?   Perhaps, that the thing about culture shock is that you don’t know where it’s going to come from. The obvious is, well, obvious. There are guns in America? No way! You’ll be telling me they drive on the right-hand side of the road next! You can’t tell which of the many and varied layers of history and culture of a foreign place are going to come into play at any one time. Perhaps, that there really is such a thing as blue corn.

Perhaps, that buying biscuits freaked me out nearly as much as buying tortilla chips. Don’t get me started.

On Landing.

It’s hard, in some ways, not to make these blog entries sound something like the narrative parts of “The Wonder Years”. It’s not supposed to be an online diary; it’s supposed to look at US culture through my eyes. But, given the fact that there are still eleven-and-a-half days till I actually go there, the best I can do until then is to walk you through my memories and expectations, plus the mind-numbing lunacy which is moving halfway around the world.

At the moment I’m waiting for a quote for shipping all my stuff. And when I say “shipping” I use the term advisedly. It’s probably going on a boat, on the sea. Probably through Panama. It might arrive with some exciting breed of spider tucked in between the Terry Pratchett books and some photos of Durham. That might be quite cool. Actually, given the fact that Stacey’s hometown was where they shot the film Arachnophobia this might not be the healthiest train of thought. Either way, my stuff is going in cardboard boxes, on a boat, halfway round the world, and it’s expensive, although not as expensive (or as ruinous to the planet) as flying it all there. Exactly how expensive remains to be seen.

It looks like it’s going to be around £800. I had thought £600, but that was when shipping companies were telling me sweet little lies, and before there were revolutions in oil-producing countries, shoving the cost of jet fuel, well, sky-high. Speaking of which, if anyone on the British side of the Atlantic feels like REALLY moaning about petrol prices (because let’s face it, it’s either moan about that or the weather, and it’s sunny at the moment) have a look at this. Prices are true as of April 26th; $1=£0.60 . Sickening, isn’t it? Never mind.

Unleaded Fuel Prices	$/gallon	=	£/litre
San Luis Obispo, CA	$4.17	=	£0.56p
Whickham, Tyne & Wear	$10.58	=	£1.41

But anyway, I’m waiting for an exact quote from various freight companies. There’s only so far you can string that subject out for, and packing is dull, so I tend to daydream. What, for example, am I looking forward to in the first week after I land? There’s the obvious task of renewing old acquaintances, but it’s not a very cultural subject. So, moving on…

Breakfast at the Hacienda Hotel

It’s not an overwhelmingly glamorous affair, breakfast in a relatively modest hotel in El Segundo, a relatively modest part of metropolitan L.A., next to Los Angeles International Airport. It’s not Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Claridge’s or Harry’s Bar. But breakfast at the Hacienda promises the world. On a day when you have breakfast at the Hacienda, you feel anything could be accomplished. Their menu is here. I would gladly have it in a frame on the wall. The reason you feel able to accomplish anything after breakfast might be that a Hacienda breakfast contains an appreciable fraction of the calories required to lift the space shuttle into orbit. In Britain, a hash brown is a perfectly respectable little thing, the size and shape of a deck of cards cut in half corner-to-corner. At the Hacienda, they are golden discs six inches across. They take your jet-lag on and they make it cry. You get two.

 

Highway One

If California State Route One was a person, it’d be Harry Connick, Jr. Oh, so he can play the piano? Just a little, or really well? Ok, phenomenally well. That’s fine, but you say he can sing too? Sure. He can carry a tune? No, he’s got a voice like melted chocolate. And he composes and directs. Writes songs? No, wins Emmies and holds US Patents.

Well, fine, so the guy’s a musician, that’s his job, it’s what he’s good at- wait, what? He’s an actor too? Oh, for crying out loud. Anything I’ve heard of? Memphis Belle, Independence Day and Will and Grace. I see. All this success must mean his personal life’s hell, right? Misery and disaster? Or is he, by any chance, just throwing this out there, married to a Victoria’s Secret model with whom he has three children? Yeah, ok. Well, at least he’s got the good grace to be an ugly bugger, eh? No? Just thought I’d ask.

Highway One is the automotive equivalent. It follows the coast from Orange County to Leggett, 180 miles  North of San Francisco; 655 miles in total. It passes through Huntington Beach, Seal Beach, Santa Monica, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Pismo, Morro Bay (see left) before heading towards Big Sur (Yes, as in The Kooks’ song, see right) crossing Bixby Bridge (Yes, as in the Death Cab For Cutie song). That’s just the first 300 miles of it. I’ll be where I’m going about 50 miles before the bridge, having seen some of the most beautiful coastline in America by doing so, but having missed out on some of the most beautiful coastline in America by stopping halfway.

 

 

Seeing Pelicans

They really are the most fantastic of birds. You will hear me rant about them out of all proportion to their achievement. They just make me laugh. They fly impossibly slowly; you imagine that anything that big, flying at such low speeds, must simply drop out of the air out of sheer embarrassment. They can also dive in the most incredible manner. After gaining height and selecting a target, they pivot on one wing and roll the other over. They plunge into the water from a height of sixty feet or so, breaking the water like gannets. But the gannet is an undeniably beautiful bird, with a pointed bill and kohl-like markings round the eyes, somehow reminiscent of the early jet-powered RAF bombers of the 1950s, all sleek lines and anti-flash white. The pelican looks like a toddler’s drawing of a pigeon. It’s like something out of the Flintstones. They are inherently comical-looking. I saw one land on the railing of the pier at Avila. Slowness of flight is one thing, but grace and control are quite different matters and its momentum nearly took it beak-first into the sink used by fishermen to clean fish caught on the pier. It flapped its wings and hopped from one foot to the other, and by some miracle of balance, completely at the bottom of whatever scale Olga Korbut was at the top of, it stayed upright. I can’t help feeling though, that however comical they look, the pelicans have it all their own way, so the joke must be on us. I love them to bits and I’m determined to get some really good shots of pelicans soon.

 

SLO Farmers’ Market

I am a big fan of the Farmers’ Market movement in the UK, which has exploded over the past decade or so. It has made available high quality, ethically farmed produce available to British consumers at prices which, while not low, are worthwhile and cut out the middle man. For example take the good folks at Broom House Farm in  Witton Gilbert, near Durham. Some of their prime Aberdeen Angus is pictured to the right here, moments before being turned into  steak and ale pie. They also produce Saddleback pork and wonderful lamb and mutton. The meat is phenomenal; it practically cooks itself. I met them at the monthly Farmers’ Market in Durham and have never begrudged a penny I’ve ever spent either there or up at the farm shop itself. The Farmers’ Market has been good for everyone; British consumers, British agriculture, and the market towns where they are held.

The events themselves, however, are somewhat…quaint. Check flannel shirts, flat caps seem to predominate. No matter where you are in the country, everyone behind a stall seems to have a Yorkshire accent. There is the faint feel of Country Life and Horse and Hound. If one stands very still, one can almost hear the Archers theme tune playing, as if by a heavenly orchestra. One is suddenly in a land of Agas and Hunter wellies. Incidentally, I’m not entirely sure whether the pictures of lithe young women showing more than a bit of thigh while wearing rubber boots is either supposed to be ironic or represents a little-suspected but not-entirely-surprising outpost of the underground fetish movement of this sceptred isle….

Anyway, as J.B. Priestley, a fellow northern city boy, put it, it’s sometimes hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins. Two redoubtable and praiseworthy institutions, neither of which I belong to, nor would I wish to. I don’t feel excluded by the people at farmers’ markets in the UK, but I don’t feel like I’m part of their club, and I don’t feel as if I’m missing out.

Predictably, in California they do things differently. In the county seat of San Luis Obispo, Farmers’ Market is a weekly social event. Restaurants from the town erect huge, broad stands. Large areas of Higuera Street are turned into open-air kitchens, where fast-working me and women see to it that skewers are grilled, pizzas are baked, ribs are roasted, tacos are made, gyros are turned, churros are fried and shwarmas are shwarmed. The air is filled with the smell of sizzling meat, spices and charcoal. There are recruitment drives; Democrats, Republicans and various charities seeking donations and membership subscriptions. Naturally, there are market stalls, selling fresh flowers and fruit, vegetables and bunches of herbs the size of footballs.  This is a flavour of what’s going on there tomorrow, at the various street intersections along Higuera:

NIPOMO STREET -- Kappa Alpha PSI - musical petting zoo [really??? What, like, bunnies with banjos?]
BROAD STREET -- Cal Poly Women's Programs - SAFER Event [for more, see here]
GARDEN STREET -- United Cerebral Palsy - Life Without Limits event
CHORRO STREET -- Loren Radis - local singer songwriter [pretty good: see here]

The market has a facebook page. It’s an amazing way to be made to feel part of the town. And you can eat yourself sick for $6.

 

And there you have it. Lots to look forward to. I’ve just booked my stuff to be shipped on Thursday 5th with Anglo-Pacific. Better get back to the packing.

It rhymes with “mucus”….

 

Cayucos, California will be my new home as of two weeks’ time.

I consider myself extremely fortunate for many reasons, but moving to Cayucos surely counts among them. It’s the town in the background of the photo behind this text. It nestles at the north end of Estero Bay, roughly halfway between L.A. and San Francisco. The pushpin on the map shows where, but only roughly. You could be dropped at a location covered by the pushpin on that map and still have a two-day walk to Cayucos.

Actually, it’s not the world’s best map. You have to appreciate that the distance between Cayucos and L.A. is the same as the distance from London to York. That cartoon drawing pin is probably about half the size of Wales. Well, probably not, but probably about thirteen-seventeenths the size of Rutland. Bigger than your average drawing pin, anyway.

Here (right) is a more useful scale map. Here you can see Cayucos in the top-left, at the north end of the bay, playing book-end to the slightly larger town of Morro Bay further south. Actually, Morro Bay has four times the number of inhabitants of Cayucos. The considerably larger university town of San Luis Obispo is off to the east. Even by the standards of small-town California, Cayucos is a fairly small place.

The town website calls it the ‘Last of the California beach towns’. Obviously this isn’t literally true. It’s at the other end of the beach from Morro Bay, for a start. But Cayucos, more than perhaps anywhere else, has retained the style and character of a real American small town.

Bill Bryson once went looking for “Amalgam, USA”- the perfect small town of the films of his youth. This was in the 1987 and 1988, following the death of the author’s father and, in his view, Reagan’s America compared poorly to Eisenhower’s. Bryson had yet to mellow into the cuddly, professorial uncle of his later books, and while his jokes were funny he was nothing if not acerbic in his criticism. He never did find anywhere resembling Amalgam, where

“Bing Crosby would be the priest, Jimmy Stewart the mayor, Fred MacMurray the high-school principal, Henry Fonda a Quaker farmer. Walter Brennan would run the gas station, a boyish Mickey Rooney would deliver groceries, and somewhere at an open window Deanna Durbin would sing. And in the background, always, would be the kid on abike and those two smartly striding men.”

                                  -The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson

But I always feel that he’d have been slightly less disappointed if he’d spent any time in Cayucos. It’s a town of 2,000 people; there’s next to nothing there. A few shops and restaurants. But the charm seems to seep up from the cracks between the paving stones and makes the whole world look better. The town was founded by Captain James Cass, a Bristolian by birth, who came to California via New England in 1867. His house, reputedly haunted, is now a rather classy-looking restaurant. If Bryson shifted his gaze a decade later into the twentieth century, and looked for somewhere where the protagonists in the Beach Boys’ songs might get around, possibly looking meet a California girl who’s had her driving privileges revoked, then he’d do worse than to take a stroll along the beach at Cayucos.

This place has an almost mythical quality in my imagination. Or rather, my memory. The sand is pale and almost powder fine. Just walking along it makes the soles of the feet perfectly smooth. Occasionally a bit on the black and sticky side too; natural tar, seeping from the sea bed in pleasantly mineral-smelling lumps, is washed ashore, melts in the sun and clags to the feet of walkers who may or may not care.  I do know that it’s the most remarkable public beach to simply walk along and watch wildlife from. The pelicans treat it as their own and I believe I had been there four or five times before the dolphins failed to put in an appearance.

The place absolutely oozes quirk from every pore. Having decided today, for example, that taking a crappy, half-plastic ukulele halfway around the world is not an efficient use of space on an oceangoing freighter, that I shall be able to replace it at Alternate Tunings Ukuleles? Oh, on closer inspection it seems they only do lessons and re-stringing now. Never mind- I can console myself by indulging in a bit of retail therapy at Bugga Boo Clothing, a shop selling "Tie dye baby clothing specializing in onesies and tees for ages newborn to 2 years old." Who knew?? 

And so we’ve managed to find a place to rent there. When I say "we", I do mean, of course, that Stacey was the one who did the hard work of finding the place, sorting out the lease and moving all the furniture down over a period of weeks. It’s a fair assumption that any time someone achieves something in concrete terms, it’s going to have been Stace rather than me. It’s small, but there’s just the two of us and the cat. There is an antique marble worktop whose stand needs painting. The grass needs cutting and the garden needs a bit of attention generally. There are shelves which need putting up, but I think Stace might just have saved them for me to do as a sop to my masculine pride after she shifted all the furniture.

I can’t think of a better place for two people who’ve been apart for far too long to settle down. I defy you to look back down the pier here and tell me I’m wrong.

CARE Package

This year, on March 1st, I was emailed by my Texan friend, the incomparably wonderful Mary Stewart:

“Hey buddy!  It's the second half of your birthday!  Well, actually, in England your birthday may already be over. But it's still your birthday in America!!  You really gotta stretch that shit out.”

I had the dubious good luck to be born on February 29th one year. Dubious, I suppose, because on the one hand I’d rather have been born than not. On the other hand it leads to a fair bit of hesitancy among my friends who are never quite sure, in non-Leap Years, when they should be dishing out the cards, sending the congratulatory texts and making the obligatory divide-my-age-by-four jokes. To be honest, it’s nice that they remember full stop; I feel it’d be rather churlish to quibble in these circumstances. I know other leap children who celebrate on 1st March, but I stay loyal to the month of my birth, and go for February 28th.

And due to the unpredictable nature of transatlantic postal services, I managed, as Mary had suggested, to stretch shit out without even trying, because the hefty parcel Stacey had sent didn’t arrive until yesterday, Thursday, 2nd March. Now, the packing being well and truly under way, Stacey hadn’t wanted to send me anything too bulky. I’ve been trying to get rid of books since September last year. In addition to selling books online I took around 120 or so to Oxfam and about the same to an auctioneer. Actually, credit where it’s due, my Dad helped out a lot with the actual taking of the actual books. The practical help I’ve had from my  parents has been invaluable. My point is (did I have one? Oh yes…) that since September I have been a net exporter of books, which is (and I say this through gritted teeth) a Good Thing.

So the bulky gift package which arrived was not packed with books, as it might  have been in days gone by, but  with stuff which you just can’t get very easily on Tyneside, but which abound in America. It was, like the CARE packages of old, sent halfway across the world to comfort and sustain the starving of Europe. Stacey, in other words, is like a one-woman mini Marshall Plan (see right for nice juxtaposition of 1940s Marshall Plan poster with unflattering maritime photo of fiancée, culminating in moderately clever extension of the “ship” metaphor.)

So, what is it that we are short of, here in the Old World? Wondrous things!

1) Beef Jerky Cure: If you don’t know what beef jerky is, I pity you mightily. The definition doesn’t do it justice. In theory, it’s spiced, air-dried strips of beef. In real life it is the very essence of saliva-invoking, savoury beefiness. It’s what ambitious young beef calves tell their careers advisers they want to become. And it’s achievable at home, if you have the time and the inclination. You get a couple of kilos of brisket and some packets of stuff. One packet contains the chemical salts you need to cure the beef, another contains spices. You slice the beef into strips, marinate it for a day or so in the cure, and then dry it on a very low heat in a fan oven for hours on end. I swear, it takes immense self-control to make the stuff last as long as it took to make. Great for long walks, low in fat, high in protein. But that’s not why we eat it. We eat it because it makes us feel like cavemen, without us having to dig a pit and chase a dangerously dangerous hairy elephant into it.

2) Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix: It might come as something of a surprise to British readers that the idea of serving  Chili con Carne (or, as we like to spell it, Chilli con Carne) with rice is a somewhat unusual one in the US. It’s not unheard of to do so, but other accompaniments are more usual. Corn (tortilla) chips are usual, or you might just as often as not get chili served on its own. However, if you want to push the boat out in taste terms you could do a lot worse than cornbread. It’s a kind of bread, made from corn. It’s sweet and has a lightness which is hard to reconcile with its depth of flavour. It looks about as likely to stand up to soaking up chili as a slice of Madeira cake, but somehow it manages. And the best way to go about getting fresh, hot cornbread is to use Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix. American packet mixes are far superior to ones you get in the UK, for some reason. I don’t know if it’s because in the UK packet mixes are seen by snobby cooks (and I will include my past self in this category) to be cheating, and so food manufacturers have perhaps avoided paying them too much attention. I now take the view that if it tastes good, it’s alright. Getting sniffy about it doesn’t make sense. For example, you might, if you wanted, make some home-made ketchup one day. But I defy you to do it every time you needed a bottle, forever; you wouldn’t dream of looking down your nose at someone who bought Heinz, would you? They’d look at you as if you’d taken leave of your wits, and rightly so. So why draw the line at ketchup? Are we going to make our own pasta, churn our own butter, bake our own beans and mill our own mustard seeds? No, I didn’t think so. Not every week, at least. If it tastes good enough, it’s authentic enough. The Americans have known this for a long time, which is why when Deirdre (my future mother-in-law) gave me some Ghirardelli brownies, I came as close as is polite to calling her a liar when she told me they had been out of a packet. She had to take the box out of the cupboard and show me the bags of powder. This Jiffy mix is along the same lines. It’s in the oven in 30 seconds, and it’s magnificent. Amaizing. Ahem.

3)- Take Five Bars: Okay, it’s a calorie bomb. But it’s a calorie bomb which contains peanut butter, caramel, chocolate and pretzels: try arguing with that. Take Five bars are made by Hershey’s, who also make Reese’s peanut butter cups. The salty-sweet phenomenon is a thing which is understood better in the United States than perhaps anywhere else: who else puts bacon with their pancakes and syrup? I tell you this: if people were really serious about bringing the Great Satan to its knees, they’d forget trying to pinch Russian warheads or hide bombs in their shoes. I’m fairly sure that if they had a real go at the peanut butter industry, American civilisation would be lost to the world within a week. THAT, my friends, is when you need Jack Bauer.

 

4) Ranch dressing: Santa Barbara County is the next county down the coast from San Luis Obispo. There, in the 1950s, two guys who worked at a resort known as the Hidden Valley Ranch. They invented a salad dressing, bottled it and sold it for a fortune. It’s tangy and creamy and savoury. It’s what “Cool Original” Doritos are flavoured with- they’re called “Cool Ranch” in America. It’s great on reheated spicy pizza for breakfast. At that point Stacey took my hands in hers, and gently and calmly explained that if I ever do that again, she’s leaving me. The implication was that how exactly I would be left might well be “mutilated with an axe on the kitchen floor”, but she never said it out loud. I could tell by the way she was controlling her temper, though. Still, she trusted me enough to send me some packets of dressing mix. Thank you, darling!

There was some other stuff too, but I know when I’ve outstayed my welcome. I shall leave you, then, with:

5) Palm tree bottle opener: I wanted a bottle opener, the one I had was broken and hadn’t worked that well when it was in one piece. When I first went to America, we drove from LA to Cambria up Highway 1, the Pacific coast road. Southern California is about as different-looking from North-East England as it’s reasonable to expect in the English-speaking world. Stace laughed at how much I loved palm trees. Palm trees will grow in practically any temperate or tropical climate, and they do. There is one species which is native to Switzerland, and a few examples grow outdoors in the Faroe Islands. There are palm trees at the end of my street. But they don’t belong there. They know it, and so does everyone else. They’re ugly and stunted; pathetic interlopers living a lie. Those people could have a perfectly respectable Rowan or Silver Birch in their gardens, but they’ve got poxy bloody palm trees. As if they’re expecting coconuts or something. It’s not a bloody Bounty advert, it’s Gateshead. It’s sad. But if those poor sods are the Tracy Emins of the palm tree world, then those that I then beheld in LA were the Elle Macphersons. They were outrageously tall, for any urban tree, and they were so…palm tree-y! They were beautiful, and I couldn’t get over it. So, when Stacey managed to secure us a little house to rent in Cayucos, the town in the background shot on this blog, she made sure one of the first things she told me was that there are beautiful palm trees visible from the windows. And I have a bottle opener to match. Thank you, love.