A seething mass of turgid drama.

The wife's birthday was Saturday and I took Friday off. Our friends M&C came up for Friday lunch, because she loves making lasagna (and is really good at it) and we have a local lasagneria that we like. They enjoyed it and it's always good spending non-SCA time with them.

Saturday she did some shopping, and then we went out for dinner. I had read good reviews of a small restaurant called 7 Adams and the wife thought it sounded good. With some careful planning, I booked seats at their 6-person "chef's counter" - it's a short bar in front of their wine fridge, with a small prep station for some basic plating. Unlike Mijoté you don't get the full "cooks prepping in front of you" experience, but one of the cooks/ sommelier/ owner-chef each took turns explaining each course as it was presented. The chef's counter is a 10-course meal - thankfully all the courses are a few bites, so it isn't way too much food.

The abbreviated menu:
a soft-boiled egg and caviar, in an extremely cute egg dish with chicken feet
sea urchin roe and cauliflower mousse
scallop crudo
tagliolini (pasta) with black trumpet mushroom and shaved black truffle
black cod with rice porridge
a buffalo wing
roast duck
a rhubarb tartlet
cheesecake and shortbread

The pasta was a particular standout - I wanted to faceplant in a much-larger bowl of it. The buffalo wing was a gourmet (deboned) homage, as the chef/owner is from Buffalo NY. The roast duck was just as good as the pasta.

The whole thing took nearly 3 hours but didn't feel like it. I didn't sleep as well as I would have liked, predictably due to rich food and wine. Worth it though.

For my birthday, we went to see an Irish sketch comedy troupe that was in town. We saw them around the same time last year and apparently their tour was successful enough to 1) do another one; 2) play larger venues, including Carnegie Hall. In SF they booked the Warfield and it seemed mostly full.

We drove to the area - I didn't want to deal with getting a late-night Sunday cab - found some sketchy parking (it's all sketchy around there; we should have used one of the hotel lots), and went to a regional Italian pizza place for dinner. They call it "pinsa", and it's more flatbread-based. Think the '80s Stouffer's pizza... but much better. Plenty of customers even on a Sunday night. If it was local to us I could see hitting it for happy hour.

This year I was able to get better seats for the show. We were in the second row, about 10' from the stage. This did mean a bit of neck-craning but also meant we were in the interaction zone. The show was good - mostly short sketches but they started with some audience questions that they mined throughout the whole show. Early on they started making fun of San Francisco for having multiple names: "You use Frisco!" and we all booed. "And San Fran." We booed again. "What do you use as a short name then?" "The City." "Oh, that's not pretentious. But you do hate Los Angeles." We cheered.

I did yell out one thing during their last skit that was a callback to one of their questions, and got smirks as they incorporated it.

A fun evening, but we didn't get home until 10:30 so I am listless today. I should probably fortify up with a second cup of coffee.

Yesterday was my dad's 82^nd birthday. We went to his place, chatted a while and told stories about our Italy trip, then took him out to dinner. He wanted to go to a local pizza place, which is decent. It was a good visit. Apparently the postcard we mailed from Italy finally arrived last week - six weeks after we mailed it. Got to love international mail.

I had planned to make a cheesecake (his favorite) but ran out of time and ert. We ended up buying a Key lime pie at the farmers' market, which thankfully was pretty good.

There's a guy usually running a charcoal grill a few blocks away from his place. They used to do tri-tip, but that got too expensive and now they only grill spatchcocked chickens. Still good, so we picked one up before we got to his place. Rather than leave it in the car and sun, we took it up and put it in his fridge... where it remains today. Darn. We were looking forward to that for dinner tonight.

Last night we went to a small local restaurant, Mijoté. It's a hole-in-the-wall place not that far from us, I think converted from a former bar. The chef/owner is Japanese, but learned Fronch cooking in Japan. The pitch is California-Fronch, done with some Japanese plating sensibilities. They only do a three-course prix fixe - no substitutions except for fud restrictions. You can add additional courses but you don't get to choose what they're serving you otherwise, which lowers their cost and makes it far easier on the kitchen. They do change their menu weekly.

There is one row of tables in an L around the outer edge of the place, and the rest of the seats are along a long bar (where we were seated). The bar faces a narrow section used as final assembly / plating (the stoves and ovens are in the main kitchen). So we got dinner and a show.

The menu:
pâté de campagne (an add-on, which we chose)
thinly sliced halibut, Tokyo turnip, persimmon
monkfish, brussels sprout, sudachi (an Asian lime-like citrus)
octopus and potato (an add-on which we did not choose, although it looked delicious)
pork loin, cauliflower, quince relish
cheese of the day (add-on we did not choose)
green tea gelee and rose ice cream in a tuile
paris-brest (add-on we did not choose)

It was lovely, not too much food but we were replete by the end. Our eyes would have liked more add-ons but our stomachs were happy we did not. Nothing was a particular standout, but that's because all the dishes were very good. The pork loin was perhaps my favorite but I would have been happy just having a larger portion of monkfish for dinner...

The bill wasn't cheap but wasn't outsized. I'd like to go back sometime.

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*Mijoté means "mixed" in Fronch. You see what I did there.

We visited my dad yesterday. He asked to go to a local Mexican restaurant that he had visited many times with his deceased girlfriend. I wasn't expecting much, but the important thing was his wishes.

I was very pleasantly surprised by their chile relleno. The batter was light, eggy, and fluffy; good amount of cheese stuffed in the pepper; and fresh out of the fryer. Honestly, the best chile relleno I've had in quite some time. The only thing that would have improved it is more heat - using a poblano pepper, perhaps. It was quite mild.

The lemon cheesecake with raspberry topping turned out quite well (we've pretty much got that recipe dialed in) and I promised to visit again in a couple months. I haven't been as good at that as I should be, especially since he's only an hour away.

Today I made yogurt rough-puff biscuits with homemade jam, and later today there will be boozy eggnog and finishing off our gourmet chocolate advent calendar.

We saw them live last night. I decided that would be a fun birthday present. They're an Irish sketch comedy group that has been around for a while; the wife sent me one of their videos some time back and I have been sporadically watching them.

After a few hiccups getting a cab, we got there and made it through the metal detector. (Followed by a wanding - which seems repetitive.) The show started and they mixed in sketches and improv work with the crowd. Not "give us three words" improv but interacting with certain people. They couldn't get the town name "Orinda" right -- they kept calling it "Orinn-dee." They also struck comedy gold with a 14-year-old in the audience.

The only sketch I had seen before was "Three Drunken Monks", which happened to be the one the wife sent me. It was still funny.

We didn't try to brave the crowd for their merch table afterwords. While I like the T-shirt having a pig on it, I don't need any more T-shirts... and didn't want to stand there for an hour just to say "Thought you were great." It was a good 90-minute show though.

We went to a nice restaurant for our anniversary. We dressed up - I even put on a tie! The place turned out to be a location we had gone to when we first moved to SF. It was then a restaurant called LuLu that specialized in wood fire-roasted meat, and made killer pan-roasted mussels. We went a few times for dishes like suckling pig, or once just to sit at the bar and share a dish of mussels and have a glass of wine. LuLu closed about five years ago but we recognized the space when we walked in.

The current restaurant (Palette) specializes in fish. We had their eight-course tasting menu and it was lovely. Caviar; tuna carpaccio; abalone; oyster; prawn risotto; a poached egg with swordfish bacon; skate; and then a dessert "bagel" of meringue and lox.

Not too much food overall, although I did get the wine pairing and they were a bit too generous on their pours... it was a good thing we took a cab home, because I was not legal to drive. On the pricy side but we knew that going in, and it was nice to do something a bit fancy to celebrate.

Thanksgiving was good. I got up around the usual (non-work) time, did some kitchen cleaning, and made a pecan pie. It looked really good (I tried to make some effort on the aesthetics) and smelled fabulous. The wife prepped brussels sprouts; we already had a cranberry-apple chutney and hard sauce made the day before. Instead of going to my dad's, Wendy and Josh invited us to their place (along with Dani) so we didn't have to do anything else.

I snuggled with Miss Bea under the covers and read. Wendy asked to push back an hour for various reasons, which was not a problem. Eventually we gathered up our stuff and drove to pick up my dad. When we got there we had a mild concern because he wasn't answering his phone (or the knock at his door). I started to worry that we were duplicating a Christmas a few years back where he drove to our place as we drove to his. But it turned out that he had just been upstairs doing a jigsaw puzzle.

Easy 20-minute drive up the road to W&J's, and we socialized for a while before Dani arrived. Eventually we had way too much food: pumpkin soup (Dani), turkey and stuffing (that approximated my family's One True Recipe, so it made me happy), our sprouts with house-cured bacon, four (!) different kinds of cranberry sauce - one of which was served directly from the can with ridges for the one person who wanted it, but the other three were homemade; mashed potatoes, and sauteed kale. Then our pie and a lovely pumpkin cheesecake from Dani for dessert.

We introduced my dad to Cards Against Humanity. He didn't quite know what to make of it but eventually got into it and won a couple rounds. We left around 9 PM, because driving him home and then us was a 90-minute trip and I am working today.

I am thankful for family, friends, and food to share with them.

We did some honest-to-$deity in-person socializing this (long) weekend. Saturday M&C came over for a Bayeux House dinner party. It was lovely to see them without staying outdoors and at least six feet away (which we did once last year). I made a couronne, which was well-received, and a strawberry-topped cheesecake, ditto. It didn't go all that late; one person suddenly was done with socializing and tapped out. That's fine; many of us are going to have weird adjustments to make as we theoretically transition back to normal.

Monday we drove down to Trish's for our annual green walnut harvest. It was also good to see her since it's been twelve months. There weren't that many walnuts on her tree, but I picked some and we also brought home some apricots. I plan cobbler tonight. The walnuts I am going to make another batch of Mrs Beeton's Walnut Ketchup, but I am considering trying to ferment this over several months rather than simmering the liquor with ingredients.