Cole Turns 30, with a Little Help from Anchor Steam Brewery

{The venerable Anchor Steam label.}

The day before Cole turned 30 (thereby becoming obsolete, according to some), we both took the day off work to tour the one and only brewery in San Francisco, Anchor Steam.  We'd been passing the building and inhaling the sweet smell of hops during our trips to Potrero Hill but had never been able to get in on a tour.  Turns out you have to reserve a spot weeks in advance.  Once I heard that my baby wanted to celebrate her birthday with some beer and history, I got on the horn and wrangled us a couple of spots.

{The brewery's Art Deco stylings.}

Even six weeks in advance, all I could get was a ten a.m. tour.  Competition is evidently fierce for this free, two-hour tour.

{Original sign in tasting room.}

The tour was REALLY good (and not just because our guide encouraged us to try all eight of Anchor Steam's offerings).  Because I recommend that any visitor to San Francisco take this tour (whether you're a beer-swiller or not), I won't recite all of the fun historical facts I learned.  Let's just say that Anchor Steam as a beer has survived a lot of trials and tribulations from its start in the late 1800s by two German immigrants to its present day status.  The brewery is even expanding to a warehouse next door but has no plans to leave the city, which I think is cool.

{A brewer hard at work monitoring some vats.  I dig his onesie.}

{Our tour guide, Joe, who did a dang good job quenching our collective thirst.}

{The Humming Ale, so named because as of 2009, the brewery is humming along.}

{Some of the vintage signs displayed in the tasting room.}

{Lush.}

{This was me really just playing with my camera.  Dark ale atop an original keg.}

{Collection of vintage Anchor Steam bottles lining the bar.}

After bidding Anchor Steam farewell, we headed up to Russian Hill to eat at Swan's Oyster Depot, which is Cole's favorite restaurant in the city.  We sat at its long marble counter and she had another Anchor Steam and a selection of oysters.  I had a delicious dungeness crab cocktail.  

We spent the rest of the day basking in the unseasonably beautiful weather (sun and 65 degrees!), reading in a coffee shop, baking/eating cake, and opening presents.  Yay for birthdays!

Olive Oil Cake: Eh.

For her 30th (!) birthday, Cole requested an olive oil cake.  I've been wanting to try my hand at one of these for quite awhile.  It's a far cry from the incredibly rich, decadent Chocolate Peanut Butter cake that I made for Cole's birthday last year (which was the subject of my very first blog post, incidentally).

After hitting Sam up for a good recipe and finding that she didn't have one, I trolled the Internet until finally settling on this recipe.

Here's how it turned out.

Looks good, right?  Nothing fancy, but certainly edible.  Well...I wasn't impressed at all.  The cake came out a lot drier and more crumbly than I expected.  The flavors were good:  subtle olive oil, interspersed with citrus and almond.  But I wasn't compelled to devour my slice, even with the citrus compote I made to go along with it.

A week later, 1/3 of the cake is still chillin' on its cake stand.  That right there should tell you something.

You win some, you lose some, right?

{Note the sweet cake stand in these photos--the crown jewel of my burgeoning vintage cake stand collection and a gift from my dad!}

Sun & Storm

I was out with my camera recently and spotted this amazing woodwork at the top of a house near ours.  I'm blown away.  I mean, look at the faces on the sun and the storm cloud.  Don't they convey so much?

Achtung!

Cautionary sign thoughtfully provided by a friendly neighbor.

Tentacles

{Spotted on Folsom Street in Bernal Heights}

At first glance, and if you make your eyes go a bit fuzzy, doesn't this aloe plant resemble an octopus' swirling arms? 

Shadows & Sun

I love shadows, I love sun, I love succulents.  On a recent afternoon these three loves came together on the front steps of my building.

These are my neighbors' plants; aren't they beautiful?  Between our place and theirs, I'd wager that our building holds at least a hundred plants of different varieties.  I recently started some dahlia bulbs on my side of the steps...crossing my fingers that they push up as promised by the flower woman at the farmers market.

A penny saved, is a penny you can use to tile a table-top.

This post is a little late, but if we're talking Christmas present fabrication, then it's quite early. I'm Sam, guest-blogging today with instructions on how to make a penny-topped side table.

Step 1: Decide what piece of furniture you wish to embellish. For me, the choice was obvious. My boyfriend needed bedroom furniture, so I chose a nice IKEA Rast, a side table. With unfinished wood, it was perfectly customizable.  And quite affordable, though I won’t say just how much because my boyfriend might sometime read this, and I HATE the idea of people knowing how much I spent on their present. So let’s just say, you could probably get two orders of pho for how much I spent on old Rast’y.

Step 2: Assemble said furniture, if necessary. Now, that Rasthole I bought didn’t come pre-drilled, no doubt due to the negligence of some drowsy, post-prandial Swede, too full of lingonberries and meatballs to do his damn job right. So drill those missing holes, or get your dad to help you, then put torque to Alan wrench and get the thing all set up.

Step 3: Choose your spray paint and coinage. I went with a greenish-blue, to complement the green in the copper pennies. Another combination that might work is nickel with yellow (your first inclination might be blue and nickel, but contrast is a concept that I’m getting more and more comfortable with).

Step 4: Slap on a primer coat of paint, allowing it to do dry completely. Spray paint your piece with multiple coats to ensure good coverage. I used almost an entire can.

Step 4: Measure your surface area, your coin, and do some calculations to figure out how much coin you need for your rows and columns. I can’t tell you what those calculations would be, because I didn’t do them! Take that Mr. Fella, and your multiplication tables! No, I take that back. I loved my fourth grade teacher, I just avoid math most of the time. As a result, I made two trips to get pennies and ended up scrounging through my Dad’s loose change.

Step 5: Using super glue, start gluing down the pennies/nickels/pesos in whatever pattern you like. My dad kept trying to get me to do some free-form nonsense, but you can tell by the pictures I vetoed that idea. But do what you like. Follow your own journey. Maybe your pennies should be in waves, who knows? You could clean them up, too, but I liked the higgledy-piggledy appearance of old gnarly pennies next to the shiny ones.

Step 6: Now for the hard part. You need a protective surface over those pennies. I used epoxy (about $30). I (and by I, I mean my dad and I, and mostly I just mean Dad) applied packing tape to the edges of the table to create a barrier. Then I poured epoxy evenly over the surface until I had about a half-inch thick layer. Crossing my fingers, I allowed it to dry overnight. Luckily, the layer was thin enough that all the bubbles came out just fine and I only had a small drip problem down one side. I cleaned up the edges with a razor blade so that they were somewhat smooth. 

Step 7: Unveil to your loved one! Pat yourself on the back, project well done!

Music for a Rainy Day

{image via}

• Bon Iver, Blood Bank EP
• Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
• Arcade Fire, The Suburbs

I have a 12th-floor view of part of downtown San Francisco right now; specifically, a bevy of tall buildings with the huge Transbay Terminal construction site smack dab in the middle.  Although the muffled sounds of heavy machinery get a little tedious, it's kind of addictive to watch them break down the old concrete and move earth in preparation for the new building.

In a completely unrelated note, I thought that Obama's speech at the Tucson memorial last night was incredibly moving.