I don’t know why the simplest things in life are the hardest to get right, but they just are. After a disappointing stab at the recipe in Martha Stewart’s new cookie book, I went digging around for my recipe which we had sent out in a Christmas card ages ago. My objective wasn’t to make a lemon bar you could pack up in a care package or contribute to a bake sale: I wanted a luscious topping on top of a cookie crust that was good on its own. It’s a little delicate, a bit gooey, and totally delicious. A lemon bar you need to eat at home with a napkin. So if you want to try it, here’s the recipe:

This is for a baking dish that’s has about 70 square inches. In my case it’s a white oblong baking dish from Ikea. I like the 7 x10 shape because it’s easy to cut with a chef’s knife in one go.

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Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter the baking dish, line it with foil lengthwise (draping over the short ends) to make removal easy, and then butter the foil.

Toast about 1/2 cup of whole almonds (5-10 minutes at 350 degrees until they smell right). Let them cool completely and then grind them up in a food processor or chop them by hand into fairly small pieces.

By hand or in a food processor, combine and cut until like cornmeal:

Spread this mixture in the baking dish and tamp down firmly. (A cheap hardware-store rectangular plastic putty scraper is the perfect tool for this job.) Bake for 15 minutes until it starts to color up a little.

Meanwhile, beat together in a bowl:

Combine in another small bowl:

Add this mixture to the beaten eggs.

Grate the zest of two lemons (Meyer lemons are great) into the mixing bowl and then juice both lemons into the bowl. (A Mexican orange squeezer does this and keeps the seeds out of the bowl.)

When the timer goes off on the crust, carefully pour the lemon & egg mixture over the hot crust and return to the oven for about 25 minutes. They’re done a few minutes past the point that the mixture sets.

Let cool, remove from the baking dish grasping the ends of the foil, slice and sprinkle liberally with powdered sugar. (The powdered sugar should be sprinkled as you serve because it can get wet and yucky after a time.)

Last step: enjoy!

Sorry if you came by looking for the rest of our Death Valley pictures. I got sidetracked today by the task of finishing my taxes. I promise I’ll have ‘em up sometime tomorrow.

		The number of ways to file your taxes online grows every year, but old fogey that I am, I’m used to using TurboTax. If you are too, it might interest you to know you can use TurboTax Online Deluxe if you have an online savings account with State Farm Bank. You don’t have to keep much money in there to use that feature.

When they’re not lovin’, some rabbits are fightin’. Apparently these two went pugilistic and who better to break up the disturbance than two chickens? Go figure.

via Towleroad

Leaving Olancha and Gus’ Really Good Fresh Jerky, we drove east into the Panamint Mountains, the western border of Death Valley National Park.

(Just a reminder that you see larger versions of the pictures below by clicking on them. Hit your browser’s back button to return here.)

Our first “sight” was the Father Crowley Outlook on the edge of Rainbow Canyon and with quite a view of the Panamint Valley. (There’s not much in the valley except for a funky motel/campground at Panamint Springs where they were charging $5.40 for a gallon of gas.)

According to what we read, Death Valley’s name is more a ruse than a statement of fact. There was a bit of gold and silver mining here and miners used the names to keep competitors away. The first resort built in the valley was at Stovepipe Wells, not far from the descent into the valley, sitting right at sea level. Just to the south was the our next “sight”, Mosaic Canyon.
Getting there meant traversing a 2.5 mile gravel road, very bumpy and slightly disturbing in my still slightly new hybrid.   The discomfort quickly proved to be worth it.
In places the canyon narrows so much that only only one person can pass through.     Very cool place!

As I said, this was a birthday trip so we splurged a bit and stayed at the very upscale Furnace Creek Inn (where we were pretty much the youngest people there). The Inn was built by the Borax Mining Co. over 75 years ago to house visitors. It became a somewhat glamorous hideway for the denizens of nearby Los Angeles.
The hotel had originally booked us into room 207, Marlon Brando’s favorite when he stayed there, but it was just too noisy with an air conditioner compressor just outside and a bulldozer hard at work nearby.
Their very generous solution was to give us the hotel’s only bungalow, Room 199, right above the pool and tennis courts!
The stone bungalow was hand-crafted by the mine’s very talented  stonemasons.
The name, Furnace Creek, refers to the spring water nearby, certainly the only reason they can afford such lush grounds.
There’s a pleasant dining room with a good wine list. The food was just adequate. Tom fared better with his nicely-cooked venison.
Even I was impressed with the spring-fed pool at a constant 82 degrees in such a spectacular setting.
As you can see, we were pretty happy with our stay here!

Tomorrow: the real reason(s) for our visit…

One of Tom’s birthday presents last month was a trip to Death Valley, which we did last week. (That’s Tom over there–>>) As usual I took hundreds of pictures over the four day trip. To make it easy for me and to make the posts easier to read, I’ll be doing these photo posts over a couple of days.
From here to there it’s a 9-10 hour car ride if we’d have done it straight through. Rather than doing that only to arrive in Death Valley dog tired, we overnighted in the unfortunate town of Mojave.
There was a picturesque abandoned library across the street from our (thankfully clean) motel.
One of the reasons we stopped in Mojave is because it gave us a chance to drive through Red Rock Canyon State Park the next morning.
The canyon, which apparently has seen movie and commercial shoots, proved to be pretty impressive, a good prelude to the big show to come.

Just before we turned east to head in the Panamint Mountains, Tom had to stop for snacks here in Olancha.

Tomorrow: Panamint Valley, Mosaic Canyon and the Furnace Creek Inn…

(p.s. If you want to see a larger version of the pictures above, just click on them. Click the back button in your browser to return to this post.)

Say what you might about the San Francisco Chronicle (and most of what I have to say is not good), they do have one of the very best newspaper food sections around. A lot of that is due to Michael Bauer, their lead food critic. His annual list of the Top 100 Restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area appears today in the Sunday magazine.

I look around Yelp, Chowhound and Zagat every once in a while, but the problem with those user review sites for me is you always have to read between the lines and decide whether the person sees the subject the way you do. I don’t agree with everything Mr. Bauer has to say, but he’s a very good restaurant reviewer, his writing is intelligent and over time I’ve learned what his perspective is and how it relates to my own.

This year’s list is totally worth a bookmark.

The List

Blue Bottle Coffee, an Oakland roaster with an intense following, has finally opened their cafe (address South of Market in SF,near the old Mint, 66 Mint St between Jessie & Mission).

I’ve been going to the kiosk in a garage on an alley near Hayes Street, the Opera House, and Davies Symphony Hall. It’s been a popular dash for musicians on our breaks as well as the local hipster crowd. It is truly amazing coffee, totally worth the upscale prices. It’s fair to say that Blue Bottle’s coffee-ness borders on the obsessive.

Most interesting about the cafe is the newly installed $20,000 Siphon Bar Coffeemaker. Check out the stuff below, particularly the NY Times slideshow on the siphon bar.

NY Times

NY Times slideshow

Gourmet.com takes a look

Bluebottle website: http://www.bluebottlecoffee.net/

Yelp.com user reviews

For Tom’s birthday last week, I made him this cool cell-phone holder out of LEGO bricks.

It’s designed for a Palm Centro with a charger plug at the bottom of the phone slot. The phone simply drops straight in with no fiddling. (There’s no hotsync cable.) Tom’s high school mug/pencil cup is locked into place with Legos and anchors the platform so it doesn’t slide around. Those are extra stylii in the figurines hands and girl on the right is on a twirling platform.

Not as fanciful as the creations of some, but brightens up something that usually a bit humdrum.

Below are closer views of the stand with and without the phone.

Another week without a new episode of Lost tonight (next one is on April 24).

I find the “catchup” repeats ABC is running to be kind of idiotic. Meanwhile there’s plenty on the web to read. I’ve never been a fanboy obsessing over every little detail, just an interested viewer. I did find this to be pretty interesting:

Lost: A theory on time travel

We’ve been seeing more expensive bread because of rising prices for wheat flour in this country. Well, other parts of the world less-equipped to take such a financial hit are experiencing price surges and shortages for their basic food grain: rice. It’s gotten bad enough that there are dangers of widespread social unrest.

There are rice shortages happening right now in Southeast Asia. Global benchmarks for the price of rice have increased dramatically since the beginning of the year. There are official or de facto export bans taking one-third of global production off the trading market.

There are an array of reasons for the shortages. The one I find most interesting is the clearing of farmlands for growing biofuel crops. This in spite of growing evidence that the carbon tradeoff for biofuels is poor and their effectiveness in abating climate warning is dubious.

No recommendations for action, just awareness. And if you eat as much rice as we do, a little judicious hoarding might not be a bad thing. (Yes I know we have domestic rice production, but it’s inferior to Thai jasmine rice, the best there is as far as I’m concerned.)

Links to some news articles below.

MyDesert.com

Independent Bangladesh/The Daily Commercial Times

Phillippine Daily Inquirer

NY Times