Randomized Output

Friday Jan 7
The second leg of our flight was ok. Sat next to a fat lady who won the elbow war. Also lost my ear drums to a toddler who wouldn’t shut up.

Arrival in Lima was crazy even at 10:30pm. Tons of people everywhere. Customs was a breeze. The taxi situation is Bizarre! So many people wanting to give you a ride. Anyone can be a taxi if they have a car and put a sign on it. Luckily we already had a pre-arranged ride.

Our hotel is cute, but it’s right on a main street so it’s a little loud. No ac is a little annoying since its humid. I’m terrible at communicating. We tried to get bottled water and it took way longer than it should have because I’m just so bad at getting non English people to understand me.

We were given a room with two double beds. Haha I think we’re the only couple in our group so the travel agent just got double beds for every room. That seemed to confuse the desk clerk.

Oh well it’s like 2am and we’ve been traveling for 24 hours.

Friday Jan 7th
I’m sitting in the only sit-down restaurant in tocumen, the Panamanian international airport, writing on my poor neglected blog because we’ve got an 8 hour layover.

Our day started at 2am to get ready for our cab ride to Dulles. We went through the employee security checkpoint. So much easier than normal. The flight left on time, which was great since I could see snow flurries out the window.

They served pancakes and sausage and fruit for breakfast! With metal knives and forks! Yay.

We had tried to get exit row seats but the website for copa air somehow prevented us. So instead, we saw Laura’s friend Eason on the plane sitting in them! He also had gotten the better second leg despite booking his tickets just 2 weeks ago! We booked our flight a month+ ago and the layover for his second leg was only 35 minutes at that time. Not enough time to possibly make it. But later they changed the time so it was an hour. meh. So he’s going to get there at 2pm while we’re not getting into Lima until 10:30 T_T

So we’re in the airport wandering around. At least there’s free wifi. The mountains of panama look pretty through the windows. There’s also a ton of duty free shops. Booze, watches, 42″ tvs, chocolate, and large stuffed animals: that is apparently what they want you to buy here.

For the main hub to South America, there are not many choices of restaurants in the airport. The sit down place called terra firme where I’m writing this, a Dunkin donuts and a Subway. Hah.

It took about 40 minutes to get a cup of coffee at Dunkin donuts. Slow, but the girl did seem to be paying attention. She just didn’t care about moving quickly.

At terra firme, the Ham and cheese was pressed like a Cuban sandwich and the hamburger was tasty. You could actually could taste the beef. Unexpected surprise! I’ll add pics to this post later. Hm, Laura got iced tea. We remembered too late that we should probably avoid local ice. Guess we’ll see how that goes!

Made another attempt at pizza and I think this is a definite improvement.  Went with a different recipe, this one from Michael Ruhlman.  He’s a food writer with several best selling cookbooks who also collaborates with Thomas Keller’s cookbooks.
Here’s our second try: second try
Here’s our much improved third try.

Picture gallery for the day.

Took a random tour of the Disney concert hall. The lady took us all around to the founders rooms which were super fancy.

Ate at shanghaiese restaurant. Deep fried fish sticks. Fish soup. Ma la Kung pao chicken. Fried tofu.

Went to Huntington library garden and museum. Saw Chinese garden. Jungle garden. Japanese garden and bonsai

Picked tangerines. Or as Laura calls them: tiny oranges with puffy skin.

Going to eat king crab legs. Nit on sale. Just had salt boiled chicken. Broth soup. Lettuce wraps. Dungeness crab.

Fixed lauras grandpas computer from a virus. Then had bday cake. And leftover duck. And Johnny walker blue label.

Picture gallery for the day.

Ate dimsum at Luna. Had soo much food.

Played 9 holes of golf with Laura and her grandparents. They walked! And they were pretty good.

Ate at New Capital Seafood. Roast duck. Shrimp with walnuts in mayo. Watercress soup. Tofu with dried scallops. Lobster Cantonese style.

Picture gallery for the day.

Went to brunch with Ray and lee at The Butcher and the Chef. Great little French cafe on south park and third. I had quiche, laura had waffles and lee had a crepe. Good coffee

Then lee drove us to golden gate national park. We walked around fort point. An then about a third of the way across the goldn gate bridge.

Then he drove us around the park and took us to sea cliff to see expensive houses. And the beach. And the science museum and tea garden

Ate dinner at Range. Had duck sous vide. With brussel sprouts citrus and chestnut purée. Laura had beef daube with barley and horseradish. App was white bean soup and chicken liver mousse

Picture gallery for the day.

Checked into our hotel. Le meridien. Wow. We got an awesome deal. It is super nice.

Went to eat at the ferry building again. Ate at taylors automatic refresher. Not as good as rays hellburger. Had peets coffee. Walked along the pier.

Met lee. Drove us to Castro district and we walked around. People watched. Drove to marina. Took some pics. Haha. Had a cookie at hot cookie.

Went to dinner at cha cha cha in mission district. Carribean tapas. The jerk chicken was outstanding. Shrimp in spicy cream sauce.

Hungout at hotel for a bit.

I don’t think it’s a secret that I love eating pizza.  So Laura and I tried making it from scratch a couple weeks ago, but I only got the pictures uploaded recently.

The most important (and only hard) part of the pizza is making the dough for the crust.  So I found a thin-crust recipe that we used.  I think it turned out ok for our first attempt, but there’s much room for improvement. We didn’t have a pizza stone so we used a cookie sheet.  We also tried just putting the pizza directly on the rack to char the bottom after it was on the cookie sheet long enough to firm up.

So we followed all the directions for making the dough and thought we were on the right track.  We even got our dough to be a “smooth and silky” ball like in the recipe photo.  When I went to split it and shape half of it into a crust, it was way too dry/hard though   In the end, I had to use a makeshift rolling pin (saran wrapped wine bottle) just to get it into a pizza-like shape.  Sadly, by doing so it also was incredibly thin (I believe thinner than it should have been).  It did semi-char nicely on the bottom though, but due to the thinness, it also vaguely tasted like a water cracker.  There weren’t any air bubbles and it was definitely not chewy.

For our second pizza we went with prosciutto, sauteed mushrooms, and caramelized onions.  The crust for this one is quite “rustic” looking as I again had issues shaping it, but didn’t use a rolling pin so the crust was a little thicker.  This one had more of a pizza-like crust due to a couple factors I think.  Besides being thicker, we also let the dough sit while we topped/cooked/ate the cheese pizza.  I think that helped contribute to the air bubbles.  Btw, if you read the recipe we used, the instructions never mentioned letting the dough sit to rise, but maybe we should have known?  shrug.  If we try this recipe again, we’ll definitely let the dough sit next time.  I did run across a no-knead recipe that uses a slow rise in the fridge that sounds promising.  So I think that’s also on the agenda.

Just in case we failed miserably, as backup, we got a pre-made dough from trader joe’s.  Here’s a couple pics of that one being constructed.  It was much wetter than our doughs, so that’s also something I will experiment with in the future.  It wasn’t as tasty, nor fun though!!

It was a good experiment and I’m definitely interested in figuring out how to improve on our crust.  More internet research!  Moar!