Doing good in the city of Angels

I spent part of my Father's Day volunteering at Project Angel Food with my graduate school alumni group. Project Angel Food initially began as a service that delivered food to patients that were fighting HIV and AIDS. Now they've expanded to provide food for anyone suffering with serious illnesses like cancer.

I actually donated the proceeds of my 1993 Honda Civic to Project Angel Food. That car was auctioned off in 2007 and had one missing headlight and the other held by extra-strength packaging tape, a non-functioning hood latch, rust from severe Michigan winters, a major dent that happened during the first two weeks that I owned it, and would severely overheat when you turned on the engine after two minutes. All that being said, it auctioned of for $1000 and it all went to Project Angel Food.

Volunteers make up 80% of the work staff. You can do everything from driving meals to needy people, working in the office, or preparing meals. For our volunteer stint, we were in the kitchen.

Being an A establishment required lots of procedures. We were to wear gloves at all times. If we touched something we shouldn't, we were to wash our hands for 45 seconds and switch gloves. We also had these gnarly plastic aprons.

I started off on Team Corn Flake with three other people. With my partner, I boxed up scoops of corn flakes into plastic containers for breakfasts - the other pair did the same thing but with Cheerios. It was repetitive mindless work, which was different from my typical repetitive mindless everyday work because I was wearing gloves and a plastic apron. After we had did the cornflakes, we moved on to making breakfast bundles of one packet of plain oatmeal, a box of raisins, and string cheese. Why someone would want mozzarella cheese and oatmeal is beyond my feeble brain, but I did as instructed.

Then we got promoted to hot food prep where we reconnected with the larger group. I joined an assembly line where I was in charge of scooping Italian style green beans onto a plastic tray to join some chicken with gravy and yellow rice.

I loaded the meals onto trays and stuck them onto those large metal tray towers that they use in Top Chef. lol

Then they were sent underneath a plastic sealer contraption. The last step was to stick on identifying labels and place them into the freezer.

Good times.

If you're interested in volunteering, you can get more information here!

Rutherford Grill

Last Napa post! Hoo-ray!

After Cakebread, we went to Rutherford Grill - it was like across the street.

Very tasty food in a casual environment...

Because we were having an early dinner, we split the seasoned rotisserie chicken with mashed potatoes colcannon.

We also got the best side of seasoned veggies that I've ever had. lol nice and lemony with a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese.

Simple hearty food. Yum.

When we left, there were a whole bunch of people waiting outside. Suckers! Tee hee - I love beating people. We got there just in time.

Redd restaurant, or shorter meal with crappier pics

Dinner on Saturday was at Redd, a restaurant owned by chef Richard Reddington of Auberge du Soleil and Masa's.

We were seated on the patio which was pleasant enough. Overhead trees provide shade for diners, and wreck havoc on picture taking.

The interior features warm woods and lots of skylights and windows to let in natural light.

The menu is classic nouveau American fare - hearty comfort food with an added refinement from world cuisines.

Our appetizers were wonderful. And filling.

Glazed pork belly, apple puree, burdock, soy caramel. Delicious - perfectly cooked and the ideal balance of salt, sweet, savory, and fat. lol

We started with the English pea and ricotta ravioli, foie gras meatballs, and shaved parmesan. Oh so good. So bloody good.

Mr. Insom's entree: Liberty farms duck breast, onion fondue, cherries, spinach, turnips, and five spice.

For my entree I got the Niman ranck pork osso bucco with a pine nut crust and green garlic potato puree. After our incredibly rich apps, I took a couple of bites and was immediately full.

But not full enough to prevent me from having dessert. Funny how that conveniently worked out. ;)

Good thing too - they were amazing.

While we were waiting for dessert, we heard the people at the table next to us arguing... Apparently one of the woman at the table wanted to look at her dining companion's cell phone and he kept refusing. At first it was sort of cute and playful, but when she kept asking, he was all, "No! I'm not giving you my cell phone! Okay?!" Why all the drama cell phone guy? Methinks you are hiding something. It got all uncomfortable at their table. Hell, it got uncomfortable at our table. Mr. Insom and I were like "awkward..." and made faces. We're very mature.

Me: Dark chocolate pot de creme, beurre noisette, and warm beignets. I didn't know what the second thing was, but I sure as hell knew what beignets were. Beignets have never lead me astray. This was so good. It reminded me of my favorite dessert as a kid - Eggo waffles and Haagen Daas chocolate ice cream.

Him: Peanut butter and milk chocolate gianduja, peanut honeycomb parfait. Again, had no idea was a gianduja was, but when our server described it as a "peanut butter cup", we knew we were in for a good time.

All in all, a delicious meal. I would definitely go back to Redd.

We weren't the only one basking in comfortable post-meal after glow. The phone asshat let out a huge fart that was distinctly audible. No apologies or anything. Such a boor! Honestly! Here he is post-fart. I took this pic on the slyyyy. Note the attire. We went home to change from before showing up. This guy rolled up right off the golf course.

Missed my date with Deppstiny

It's late. Please excuse the title.

Last night I totally missed a golden opportunity for my blog. I stumbled onto the movie premiere for Public Enemies, Johnny Depp's new film, during my errand to Bel Air camera. It was LA finery at its best - French tourists, people holding up cameras, random shrieks for no apparent reason, assholey "cops", bleached blond ladies with skin tight outfits, sports car driving bluetooth-wearing tan men, etc.

I waited with the masses, hoping for a glimpse of something. But I saw nothing. And worst of all, I didn't have a camera as my cell phone was dead. Eff!

So I have to redo it.

The next one in my area is a Matt Damon film, but I'm going to be out of town. Bummer.

So it looks like I'll be a paparazzi-in-training for....

Sony's
"Julie & Julia"
(Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, et al.)

Monday, July 27, 2009 - time TBA
(arrivals are likely to start between 5 PM and 6:30 PM)
Westwood Village

Awesome.

Benzinger vineyards

The only vineyard that we stopped at in Sonoma County was the Benzinger Family Winery, located in Glenn Ellen. Fortunately, it was a really good one.

Benzinger is a biodynamic vineyard. There's have a super informative self-guided tour along a outdoor trail that provides detailed information about the biodynamic growing process.

I could have spent a full hour there and I thought it alone was worth the visit. If I had read everything in detail, I probably could have started my own damn vineyard.

Basically biodynamic farming is the highest form of organic farming and goes beyond eliminating chemical inputs and strives to have a closed farming system.

Meaning that the fertilizer that they use consists of harvested crap from the llama and chickens that walk around their fields. They stick the crap in cow horns and bury them in the ground.

Meaning that instead of pesticides, they use a variety of flowering plants along the vineyards to attract good bugs to eat the bad bugs.

Meaning that they have houses for all sorts of flying critters to eat rodents and insects.

They're hard core.

The wines are good too.

I got the reserve tasting ($15 for 7 wines) and Mr. Insomniac got the basic tasting ($10 for 5 wines).

They were wonderful... It was right about here when I wished for the hundredth time that I lived within driving distance of wine country. I was so envious of all the NoCalers picking up large quantities of wine, without a care of how to cram it into a suitcase without going over maximum weight allotments. *sigh*.

Like Cakebread, for all the wines they produce, Benzinger only sells a few in retail stores. Why bother with the distribution fees when they can sell directly to visitors and folks in their wine clubs? *sigh*

Boo.

Cakebread Vineyards

Our big winery trip was at Cakebread Cellars where we did the Sensory Evaluation tasting Experience extravaganza eleganza.

First we got a tour. We showed up late. Of course.

Where all the Cakebread is bottled.

Then we sat down in a room with a long table and a bunch of glasses.

We got a handy dandy information sheet about wine tasting. And a free pocket fold out wine tasting guide as a parting gift. But with the information sheet, it had um, information (unfortunately I don't have it in front of me and I don't remember lol).

There were glasses of various liquids that contained the four main components of wine - sweet (which was really sweet - ugh.), alcohol, acid, and tannin. We really didn't get much into this. Midway through the Experience our guide was like, oh, drink these things. Actually that wasn't true. We did talk about how each of these components can be felt in specific areas of the mouth. I should have mixed them in an empty glass and created Insomniac Wine 2009 - goes down smooth.

The process went like this.

• Our host/guide would walk around and pour us wine. We'd all sit there like obedient children. Once everyone had their wine, he'd say something.
• We'd look at the color and sniff.
• Then we'd swirl it around to release the bouquet and sniff again.
• Then we'd taste.
• Then we'd mark our information sheet. On the back it had a 1-4 rating scale that assessed the presence of certain elements - tannin, sweetness, etc. You put a 4 if it was balanced, 3 if it wasn't, 2 for something, 1 for something - who knows.
• Then we'd each go around and say what we marked and why.
• Then the host/guide would pass around a specially chosen aromatic - like a grapefruit peel, cranberry jam, rose water, something that I thought was molasses, but wasn't. We would have to guess what the aromatic was and then agree that the wine tasted differently after inhaling it.

One thing that I learned is the importance of swirling before drinking. Sure you look a little like a pretentious douche, but the wine tastes and smells so much better when the aromatic compounds have been exposed to air. So I now appreciate the pleasure of swirling and sniffing the bouquet before drinking. I am well on my way to cementing my pretentious douchiness.

The whole experience was educational enough, but just not very fun. We weren't with a fun group, our guide kept making cheesy wine jokes ("if you don't remember the 5 Ses, just remember the 3 Ds - drink, drank, drunk.") and wasn't every engaging. One woman kept talking about how she can't get wines at the local Pic N Save in Texas. Her husband kept laughing at nothing. Everyone else was quiet and boring.

I missed my old wine tasting family. They were fun.

One plus side of the tour/tasting was that our guide didn't try and push any wine on us. When we were done, we exited out of the gift shop where wine and assorted other wine gear was sold, but no one gave us the hard sell. No wine clubs were mentioned, no going around the group asking how many bottles you were going to take, no nothing. We walked through the gift shop and out the door.

After the tasting, we took a stroll outside to see the garden and the vineyards.

So long Cakebread!