Saket Vora

Two new music artists I like (and have mentioned here before) had shows added in SF recently, which gets me more excited for this fall’s concert lineup. Here is what I’m going to as of now:

Wed, September 22nd – Local Natives @ the Fillmore

Sat, October 2nd – Arcade Fire @ the Greek Theater

Tue, October 19th – Jónsi @ the Fox Theater

Tue, October 26th – Sufjan Stevens @ the Paramount

Thu, November 4th – Two Door Cinema Club @ Slim’s

Wed, November 10th – Delorean @ the Great American Music Hall

Pretty excited – six artists, six different venues. Interested in coming to any of these? Is there a show I’m missing out on? Let me know!

While much of the country has already been through the wringer of a heat wave, San Francisco just now got its first taste of one. It got up to 95 in the City and was hovering at triple digits down in Cupertino in the late afternoon.

And it is a balmy night — at 12:45am it’s around 85°F in my room. This brings to mind a song I’ve been wanting to post ever since summer was on the horizon, but now it’s finally appropriate:

Animal Collective – Summertime Clothes

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I’ve had this idea for a long time, and this past weekend I finally tried executing it: deconstructed s’mores. I envisioned a jumbo marshmallow, with an interior cavity filled with liquid chocolate. The marshmallow would then be dipped in chocolate, then wrapped in a graham cracker crust. Check out the results:

Injecting chocolate into the marshmallow

Applying the graham cracker crust

The finished product (the plain chocolate one was a test vehicle)

At the dinner party yesterday, a few people tried these “deconstructed s’mores” and were quite positive about them. I haven’t tasted them myself yet, so that was quite a dose of encouragement. Cause you know, if this Apple thing doesn’t work out, then this is all I’ve got! My next steps are to acquire proper jumbo size marshmallows, improve the chocolate melting SOP to achieve more optimal consistency and smoothness, and investigates ways of increasing throughput of the chocolate coating step. I also want to start some DoEs to see the effect that different cooling approaches have on final texture consistency.

(man, so this is what happens you start thinking about culinary experiments in a similar way to optimizing an iPod line flow? now I need to line up my testers, hehe)

Another successful Sunday Night Dinner yesterday, thanks in large part to our guests. The cast of characters: Julie, a fellow Noe Valley resident (roommates with Wendy now) who started as an intern at Apple back in 2008 and is there full time; Brandon, a colleague of Julie; Gloria, former resident of iPodland who is now colleagues with Troy at Flipboard; Dustin, which you all have met before now; and Gloria’s friend Jack.

Gloria just flew back into town from a wedding, but the timing was perfect so I ended up picking her up at the nearby Muni stop just as Dan and I finished getting groceries. Dustin had biked down to Half Moon Bay and camped there by the beach last night, and just got back into town. He’s been training for his New Zealand bicycle touring trip in a few months. Dan and I had actually spent the afternoon with Brandon and Julie at the Stern Grove festival concert.

Tonight’s menu: grilled salmon for the omnivores, grilled portabello mushroom cap with basil/rosemary infused goat cheese with crushed garlic for the veggiesaurs, with sides of roasted sweet potato fries, grilled corn, and green beans.

Gloria looks after some sweet potato fries

Brandon got the bread ready for the appetizer, served with brie and goat cheese

Gloria and Dustin

Pot o’ roasted corn

Julie serves up some sweet potato fries. We did them two ways – one batch skinned and trimmed, the other ‘dirty’ style, just as unprepped as you could get.

Dessert – boozy peaches with cream. Brandon made perfect slices of peach and we let them sit during dinner in vanilla and brown sugar. I used my immersion blender and whipped some heavy cream with some brown sugar and Maker’s Mark whiskey. I wanted to top with toasted pecan crumbles, but accidentally burned the pecans in the oven. Sigh.

Dustin did a quite a nice job with the presentation!

I heard the salmon turned out well, and Dan’s fine hand at roasting the portabella mushroom caps for Dustin and me was well appreciated. The slightly melted goat cheese over it with rosemary was excellent. For second dessert (because why not?) we had a berry pie that Gloria brought from Mission Pies.

This one comes with a hat tip to my buddy John, who always is listening to something new and cool. Delorean (yes, named after that car with the flux capacitor) hails from Spain where they found success in re-imagining the local dance music scene. The end result to my ears is music that is upbeat but not frenetic, easy to listen to but intricate in their drum beats and sampling. Upon first listen, I was reminded most of Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion but these guys are much more consistent and accessible.

Here are two songs for you to check out:

Delorean – Real Love

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Delorean – Infinite Desert

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Heads up Bay Area folks – Delorean is coming to the Great American Music Hall on Wednesday, November 10th. Who wants to come with?

Stars, a longtime indie pop band out of Canada, released their eighth album or so this past June called The Five Ghosts & The Seance. I heard it via Troy one night and it caught my ears.  The sound and harmonies of the two lead vocalists really shine here, and the penchant for swelling flourishes remain true to the Stars’ style (see the near end of Fixed). The theme of ‘ghosts’ run through out the album, which actually reminds me also of the Freelance Whales’ Weathervanes. Try these two songs:

Stars – Dead Hearts

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Stars – Fixed

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A few weeks ago (maybe a month already? time is flying back like a jet these days), I picked up the nifty fifty, a 50mm prime lens. A “prime” lens is one that has a fixed focal length, meaning you can’t zoom with it. The advantage though is it’s capable of low f-stop numbers, which means its aperture can become very wide and this results in a shallow depth-of-field. Or put another way, it helps you achieve the coveted ‘blurred background’ look more easily. This lens can go to f/1.8.

Here are a few shots I took with it with the first two things around when I put the lens on. Predictably, it’s the lens that I just removed…..and an iPod. :)

We went out to celebrate Michael’s birthday on Saturday, and first stop was dinner at Suppenküche, a German restaurant in Hayes Valley that is simply wunderbar. The ambiance immediately reminds me of a real German beer hall with arched ceilings, simple pine wood tables and benches instead of chairs, and of course — an incredible beer menu. Speaking of the menu, it was tickling to see it written with Deutsch as the primary language,  with English as subtitles.

We got a giant Bavarian pretzel, and Michael got a 2 litre boot! At least four different Bavarian hefeweisses dotted the table, and they even had Augustiner, a beer beloved by a German friend of mine from Sweden. The wait staff was terrific — we had brought a cake in a pan that Karla made herself. They smoothly took it when we entered and kept it in the back until it was ready. They even found some candles for us, and then served it out in plates after Michael blew out the candles. Before we left, they thoughtfully cleaned the pan out before giving it back to us.

Afterwards we walked over to the Haight and hit up Toronados. We had an early dinner, so it wasn’t too crowded.

After Toronados we went to 330 Ritch. The DJ was actually rather good, much better than the Pink Mammoth DJ at Club Mighty where we went for Karla’s birthday.

I woke up late on Sunday, went to brunch with Troy at Toast, then walked up to Dolores Park. Lately I’ve been reading Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. It’s the first large bit of fiction I’ve read in a while, and quite good so far. It’s narratives weaves together World War II adventure, cryptoanalysis, a modern tech startup building a data haven in east Asia, and two parallel stories that bridge two time periods. I’ve been reading it for about two weeks, and I’m about 650 pages in. So far so good!

Dolores Park was, predictably, gorgeous. I walked home from the park. We’re trying to start a tradition of Sunday night dinners at our house, where we cook food and invite friends. Today we invited Andrea and Vanessa, and Alice and her friend Paul. I met Andrea back in 2008 when I was an intern at Apple — he worked down the hall on software for the Nano. He’s in another department now at Apple, but I often see him at Caffe Macs, invariably talking in Italian with a cadre of fellow Italians. Mariani 1 misses him. He and his wife actually just moved to the neighborhood, a half dozen blocks away. We really do have a nice community now!

Alice made an appetizer of goat cheese and figs on baguette, and Andrea used a rolling pin to make an Italian appetizer called piadina, an flatbread with fresh mozzarella and panchetta. I was surprised to see that it took on the texture and taste of roti. We used a wok (thanks Dustin!) and made a stir fry with tofu and chicken. For dessert, they took fresh cut peaches, peaches & cream ice cream, and topped it with amaretto biscotti crumbles.

Prepping the dessert

Delicious.

Vanessa and Andrea

Yeah, I’d say the weekend was a success.

Just a quick update – I put together a video/photo compilation from the Castle Crags camping trip. I’ll be honest — the night shots were just me trying out the new camera!

Click here to watch in HD.

This past Saturday I got a phone call from Mary — Caitlin and Dale were in town! Having just finished the bar exam, Caitlin figured it was a good of time as any to make it out west. They drove up to the City in the afternoon, and got to see the house. We headed out towards downtown, Lombard St., the Embarcadero, etc. I had told Caitlin and Dale as we hit the road that “you’re guaranteed to see at least one interesting thing every time you venture into the CIty”, and sure enough we got it. We were circling the Ghirardelli Square area for parking, and saw a car stopped in front of us. No big deal — usually someone is parking up ahead. In our case though, the guy gets out to have some heated words with the car in front. The other one says angry words back. And in a blink of an eye, a full on fist fight erupted in front of us. A ripped shirt was thrown to the side, and the two ended up squaring off, fists raised, right in the middle of the street.

Well then.

Fortunately, a burly MUNI driver walked up, separated the two,  and pointed them to their cars. They got in, and drove off. And that was that. Anyway, we headed out to the Marin Headlands with its great views of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Haha, nice one Matt.

^ Mary took this one!

After Marin, we finally made it to Ghirardelli and got hot chocolate and sundaes. Now before you ask — yes, it’s perfectly acceptable to enjoy hot chocolate in the summer time. It’s San Francisco! Hehe. Later that night I headed down to Menlo Park to have dinner with them. It was so great to see them! And that reminds me…I need to have Mary and Matt over for dinner and cook up a feast for them…