Reflecting Part 1

After yesterday's very personal blog entry, I decided I wanted to dedicate this next series of entries to my coworkers at Cisco, my godmother in NYC, and others who have kept me sane and well fed over the past couple of months. I may not have time to finish this particular part until later this afternoon as I believe some current and former coworkers and I are going out to lunch again today.

These first parts will catalog my eating excursions (besides Bocce ball) with my coworkers. Fortunately for me, most of my coworkers are as interested in global cuisine as I am, so I have eaten at a good variety of places since arriving at Cisco - some expensive and fancy, some very cheap and casual. Very shortly after I was hired, I was invited to a holiday gift swap with my female coworkers which took place at the nearby Pasta Pomodoro. http://www.pastapomodoro.com/ They are a chain native to California that serves Italian and seafood dishes.

Penne with tomato sauce and cheese and stuff. It was okay. Kind of overpriced for basic pasta - I can probably make it better and for a lot less than the restaurant price.


Some of my coworkers then. Everyone but Eve (far left) is still here...for now. I didn't even know anyone's name for a while...I am so bad with names. Next to Eve is Bing, then Valentina, then Olga, and on the very right side is Lia.

For my gift swap Olga and I wound up having each others names, and I received a very nice wine set (bottle opener and 4 stoppers) while I gave her some Christmas cookie baking sets and a puzzle, which wound up working very well because she was planning on visiting and baking with her young nieces later that day. I still have and use the wine set.

I guess I will feature one restaurant/event/day so this will be in more parts than I originally planned, but I guess this gives each one its own time to shine and me a way to update more regularly and efficiently. Until tomorrow then...

Questioning

Well, it's been a while again. I was so ready for a return to writing regularly after that last short mobile post, but then so many things in my life changed. Some people prefer to update quickly as events unfold; a desire made easier with the advent of forums such as Facebook and Twitter, but I prefer to let everything finish and calm down so I have time to reflect and look back on everything as a whole. I haven't felt emotionally comfortable with writing what has happened to me in the past couple of months, particularly when I find it a lot easier to write about success and fun food excursions rather than what right now feels like failure. I decided it was better that I wait until I really felt the need to write, and after going through what to say over and over again in my head, that has finally happened. As such, after making another long excuse for not writing again, I will give a quick update on my life.

On April 5th, after enjoying a wonderful week touring the bay area with my brother, Dad, and Matt, I returned to my job at Cisco Systems only to learn that the majority of my department was being outsourced overseas. I was probably going to lose my job by the end of April, just a few months after I had started. I was devastated, and along with most of my coworkers, began to go through the five stages of grief. I even refused to believe my Japanese co-worker, Sakura, the first day because everything just seemed so sudden and unreal, even though looking back, it is not uncommon at all these days for tech jobs to be outsourced to cheaper labor markets.

Then, on April 15th, Matt and I decided that our relationship was not working particularly well and that we should end it. I know I have been immensely private during this relationship, so while this was not a surprise to me, it may have been or still be to some of my friends. We had not been doing well at all; neither of us had been happy or even feeling much like a couple for quite a while. I had even previously spoken to my dad just a couple days before the 15th to tell him I didn't think this relationship would last much longer. My dad said to give it time, so I had been, but ultimately Matt brought it up before I had even decided when might be best. There really is no best time to do it anyway. To answer the inevitable question of why we broke up, without going into ranting specifics, suffice to say that we currently have very different goals in life and that we both feel we have a lot of things we need to accomplish before settling into a relationship where we are unsure of the future of said relationship.

Hopefully this will clarify some of my statements and actions on Facebook about being lost and single. I don't really mind being single and I am still on good terms with Matt, it was just a lot to go through between that and the fear of losing my job at Cisco. I decided to handle my mounting stress in the ways I know best - by traveling and eating good food. One day after Matt and I broke up, I booked a flight to visit New York City for four days to reflect, eat lots of delicious food, tour unique places, and go shopping in Soho. More to come on that later. After returning to San Jose, I learned that Cisco had extended my and some of my coworkers' contracts by three months, until the end of July. We all promptly spent the entire last weeks of April partying and eating out every single day. I felt like I was back in college. More to come on that later as well. I don't particularly feel that this serious blog entry should feature mood-lightening food.

So, as my entry title states, lately I have been questioning everything, particularly who I am as a person and where I want to go in life from here. I know that in the long run when I look back I probably will say that coming out here wasn't a complete failure. I have been learning a lot about myself, I am gaining experience at Cisco, meeting lots of new people and so on, but right now I am just kind of frustrated at everything and still mostly lost. However, things could be a lot worse in life - I still have my job at Cisco, and I am still living with Matt until the end of July when both our apartment contract and my work contract come up. And most importantly I have still found plenty of time to enjoy parts of my life, even if they are the simple events of talking to my supportive friends and family, seeing a movie, going places with coworkers, and of course, eating and cooking lots of good food.

My adventures with food return tomorrow morning. Featuring NYC pizza and local San Jose/Milpitas restaurants! Stay tuned.

Pixel Pipe

I'm trying out this application for Android called PixelPipe that always me to send blog posts and photos from my phone, but I'm using the free version, so I'm not sure how well it works. Since St. Patrick's Day is on a Wednesday, we celebrated early with Matt's parents with some homemade, traditional food. It was filling, warm, and delicious.

*update* So, seems PixelPipelite is great for uploading pictures to the blog, but not so great for posts. I'm going to look into some other applications for blogging on the go, but otherwise I can probably just use the browser, or wait until I get home. *end update*

Oops?

Sometimes I really don't care much for real life. Particularly that horrible truth that just about everyone seems to run into eventually - if I don't have a job, I don't have enough money to do all the things I want to do. But if I get a job, and I do earn the money, then I don't have enough time for those things anymore. And I definitely don't have enough money for everything. But if I get a better job with more money, than I have even less time...the circle of real life would continue. Ugh.

That was basically just a long winded excuse as to why I haven't updated my blog in a month...I was doing it at work (my computer and internet speed are both faster there), but now that I have been there a couple of months, they have discovered that I am decently competent and have started assigning me more work and training me for different work. Work that requires actual thought, instead of just mindlessly organizing data. So I haven't had time there like I used to. And the rest of life was already busy.

However, during the past busy month, I obviously still found time to eat and eat well. That is one thing I refuse to give up. I don't care much for instant and fast food, so I have been compromising on other things I would normally do to make time to cook full meals or eat at delicious restaurants.

Or, in the case of today, to go well out of town in the hope of finding something delicious to eat or drink and somewhere fun to explore. Today Matt and I went with his parents to Napa Valley to celebrate the birthday of one of their long time family friends. I had met these family friends over last Thanksgiving dinner, so they were nice enough to invite me as well. We all got up early this morning to take one of those wine tour charter buses all the way up past Napa onto Calistoga and finally stopped to tour and eat at a winery called "Castello di Amorosa."

I've only ever been to a few standard wineries before, but if you can guess from the first Italian word in the name, this one was very different from a normal winery in California. Very, very different.


That's the entrance.



There's one of its towers. And even a moat.

According to our energetic tour guides, this winery was built by an very successful Italian American winemaker to replicate, as closely as possible with modern California building codes still kept in mind, an Italian castle from the 13th century. I have yet to go to an authentic Italian castle, so I cannot say if I felt if he succeeded or not, but this still made for one heck of a unique experience. I did not expect to find a Renaissance style castle in Napa Valley, California, let alone one used for a vineyard, storage and bottling facility.

I took so many photos, but since this is a food blog and not a castle blog, I will just include a few more of them before getting to the main course.



View from the castle.

Main dining hall. We didn't eat here, but I guess the Governator and some other famous politicans have.

17th century replica of an Iron Maiden in the castle dungeon.

Okay, here is the room we ate in for lunch. Long tables, gigantic wooden chairs, and lots of Renaissance era styled art. The food was served as main course buffet style, and after a dessert, and of course, with however much red or white wine from their two chosen estate wines that you wanted. The wine, as hoped, was really good. I don't have any photos of it specifically because I was much too busy drinking it. While none of our party of four (Matt, myself, and his parents) bought any of the red or white served with dinner, we did spring for some of the delicious dessert wine we had sampled during a wine tasting earlier as part of the tour.

This food looks delicious right? Well, actually it was kind of a disappointment, considering how accommodating everything had been up to this point. All of the food was cold. Really, really cold. I guess it was for effect and to be gourmet, but as the room was already rather cold from a lack of utilities (the builder was going for authenticity remember) I found this aspect of the food less than appealing. Add that to my personal preference for most of my meat (aside from certain fish and tapas) to be warm, and also the opinion that I thought a lot of the dishes tried to be overly gourmet by loading on the variety of seasonings, and I wound up mostly eating the rolls and drinking wine.

I guess next time I want a really good meal in Napa or Calistoga I should go to a restaurant instead of a winery, but as this was all prearranged for the birthday party and also completely paid for, I probably shouldn't complain too much. The food wasn't bad; I was just expecting better.



Dessert by contrast was absolutely delicious. Chocolate and hazelnut cake from a local bakery and small but exquisite fruit tarts.

While I was worried this would be an awkward event considering I had met the hosts only once, it is always amazing how social people can become after the wine starts flowing...but even without that I actually had a really good time. I definitely want to go back to Napa and Calistoga in the future, and maybe even go on more winery tours, though I wonder if any of them can live up to the experience that was the Castello di Amorosa.

(oh, and if anyone was wondering about that last random post of a photo of a cat...seems my cat, Anna, got a hold of my phone/the phone became possessed and was posting stuff to Blogger via one of the applications I have installed. I did not eat her, will not be eating her ever, and hopefully that will not happen again)

Nina Plays Bocce Ball?

As my friend Zachary pointed out to me today, lately I haven't had time to cook as much, so my food photos trend largely towards meals eaten in restaurants or even that last post about the food my boyfriend made. Sadly, that is the reality of the working life. Although I actually have quite a bit of free time at work (case in point now, as I blog at my desk), I usually don't get home until 6pm or later, and as I am someone who is used to an early supper, by that time I am famished. I don't like cooking anything complicated when I'm really tired and hungry as I find I tend to rush the process and make mistakes or have accidents. I know plenty of people who do cook elaborate meals after a long hard day of work and find that to be very therapeutic, but until I get used to having a full time job I just don't think that's for me. So, probably not too many photos of my actual home cooked food until the weekend or a vacation break or something. Although, I did make homemade mapo tofu sauce yesterday! But as indicated by today's title, mapo tofu is clearly not the main topic for today's entry.

Work may have detracted a bit from my cooking experience, but I do not believe it caused any compromises in the quality of my eating experiences. In fact, last week my temp agency, Buxton Consulting, paid for all of my group to eat an entire Italian buffet at this restaurant and bocce ball place, Campo Di Bocce of Los Gatos, for a "team building experience." I hope they do this again - it was great.


First course - appetizer (whatever it is in Italian, I forget) - breaded calamari.

Main course - buffet style, but it was a personal buffet set out only for our group, so it was fresh, warm, and delicious. Bread accompanying salmon, beef, fettuccine alfredo, spaghetti with meat sauce...they were nothing especially gourmet, but well done, satisfying dishes nevertheless.

Third course - dessert- Cannoli! After stuffing myself during the buffet part and drinking lots of red wine (also paid for by Buxton), I am not entirely sure how I had room for dessert, but this cannoli was excellent and I managed somehow.

Finally, after eating and drinking and bonding over the food and wine, my coworkers and I were split up into teams to attempt to play Bocce ball. While I am not going to write out all the rules for this traditional Italian game (here is the wikipedia link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bocce_ball), the basic idea is you want to bowl a bigger ball as close to the smaller ball as you can, and you want to get as many balls closer to it than the other team has.

This is at close as I made it that entire night, which I thought was pretty good (though it got knocked away by the other team during their next turn).

Watching the court.

"Passionately discussing" which team got it closer. They even provided tape measures, because sometimes the human brain is not so good at judging really similar distances.

Anyway, stories of homemade mapo tofu sauce are going to have to wait until later as I want to get out of the office before 6; I just thought I would share my culinary adventures that my company actually paid for. And yes, I also got paid as well. What a life.

Matt cooked!

While I clearly enjoy cooking or I wouldn't have this blog, I have always believed in both of the parties in a relationship sharing all the necessary household stuff, including cooking. Especially now that I work basically just as much as he does, I was getting frustrated with almost always being the one to turn on the stove/oven/microwave right after getting home. It's not that he had never offered either, it's more that whenever he offered, it was almost inevitably the same two things - macaroni and cheese or pasta with canned tomato sauce. While I am a fan of both, I crave variety in my life and there are a lot of dishes I love a lot more. But finally, yesterday my boyfriend expanded his repertoire to include one of them - miso soup.

Delicious. I love miso soup. For those who aren't familiar with it, it is a traditional Japanese soup with a dashi (we used katsuobushi, or bonito in English, a type of fish, but other types of soup stock can be used) base, soybean paste (miso), and we added tofu, wakame (seaweed), and green onions. All these ingredients can be found at your local Asian grocery store.

The other dish is mostly comprised of what has been saving us those nights we are both too tired to do much of anything - Trader Joe's frozen vegetables and chicken. Definitely the supermarket with the highest quality frozen foods hands down, and one of the places I missed the most while in Japan.

Anyway, hopefully my boyfriend will be cooking more as I firmly believe he is capable of cooking different delicious things if he practices. I think his parents even picked up on my desire for this, because they bought him not one, but two cookbooks for his birthday, which I thought was great. However, as cooking is still something I think I enjoy more than he does right now, I figure I can live with compromises on not completely sharing the cooking (such as him washing the dishes, which he usually does) and concentrating on expanding my own food repertoire. What to cook next...

Let's Go Sharks?

Today was my boyfriend's 26th birthday. To celebrate we went with a couple of his friends to a Sharks (NHL team) game. It was my first time to a hockey game ever, and I liked it more than baseball (based on a minor league game in San Jose). It was very flashy and fast. But the Sharks lost. 4-2 to the Detroit Red Wings. Oh well.

Of course, like most sports patrons, I had something to eat during the game. We wisely ate beforehand at a Togo's (a sandwich chain) to avoid most of the overpriced options, but I had a bad craving for french fries. Luckily they were relatively cheap and fresh.


My delicious and cheap Togo's sandwich before the game

The HP Pavilion Stadium (seats over 17,000 people -the game tonight was sold out too)


Warning! Flying pucks!

My fries!

I meant to take some pictures of the outside of the building and him with his friends, but I was tired and I forgot. I am sure I will find a way to deviously take photos of those same friends for this blog in the near future though...

As a random side note, the company my boyfriend works for, Brocade, sponsors a Sharks' zamboni. Great place for advertising, even if it was pretty ridiculous looking.

Finally, to celebrate my boyfriend's birthday with the appropriate traditional food, here is a photo of the birthday cake his parents bought him from a local grocery store. It was carrot cake with cream cheese icing. Very tasty, but so rich that to eat to any more than just a small piece was immediately stomach ache inducing.

The birthday boy with his cake,

And a close up of the nicely decorated cake.

All right, I think that was a pretty meaty post as I managed to update on time (more or less) and continue to blog regularly as I said I would. Considering how late it is here I think I did pretty well. Until the next post (soon if not tomorrow), have a good night!