Red Door By the Beach

“Well, it may choke Artie, but it ain’t gonna choke me!”  (Stymie, one of the “Our Gang” kids)

Nothing says Spring in the farm fields near the Red Door than the beautiful globe artichokes (Cynara Scolymus) just waited to be stuffed or made into filling for ravioli.  Yum!  Here are two recipes from Allrecipes.com for your artichoke eating pleasure.  The first reminds me of how my Italian father used to prepare artichokes, the second is a wonderful “lite” Alfredo sauce which is great over Trader Joe’s fresh artichoke ravioli.

Stuffed Artichokes                     Quick and Easy Alfredo Sauce

And then there’s the wine.   Definitely a pinot grigio.  Light, cool and crisp.  Castoro Cellars or Meridian both make wonderful ones.

Getting ready for Easter dinner tomorrow and need to get the music playlist together.  Here are the  selections for this year. The list is divided into two parts: classical and pop/jazz.  Links are to Youtube videos of the selection. 

The poppies are blooming on the Central Coast.  I found these in a vacant lot across the street from my mechanic.  You can find beauty everywhere you look.  I’m going to have to go for a drive this week and find some more.  They revive my spirit.

Classical

• Sonata for Violin and Piano No.5 in F, Op.24 (Beethoven)
• The Four Seasons(”La Primavera,” No. 1), Op.8/1, RV 269 (Vivaldi)
• Appalachian Spring, ballet for 13 instruments-Simple Gifts (Copland)
• Blumine (”Flora”), for orchestra (discarded movement from Symphony No. 1) (Mahler)
• Frühlingsstimmen (Voices of Spring), Op. 410 (RV 410) (Strauss)
• Spring Song (Mendelssohn)

Popular Music

• “Spring Can Really Hang you up the Most”
• “Beautiful Day”
• “Here Comes the Sun”
• “Turn, Turn Turn”
• “Daydream”
• “It Might as Well Be Spring”
• “You Must Believe in Spring”
• “Skylark”
• “Spring is Here”

The latest Pacific storm is supposed to show up in my neighborhood tomorrow or Friday.  It makes for some great waves today.  Warm temperatures and beautiful clear sunsets to enjoy for the moment.

A welcoming display at a local winery near the red door invites everyone inside to find the perfect wines for the coming Thanksgiving feast.  I found a really nice article about turkey and wine pairings that might help those who are wondering which wine to buy. Assuming that the main course is turkey, I suggest serving sparkling, chardonnay, and pinot noir at your feast since everyone has such different tastes and all three go well with the bird.  Something from Laeticia for the sparkling wine, a Zaca Mesa chardonnay, and a Wild Horse pinot noir?  So many choices. 

The leaves on the vines are starting to change, the Central’s Coast homage to autumn.  Besides getting ready for our own Thanksgiving, I attended a harvest dinner at one of our favorite wineries and enjoyed an amazing five course dinner paired with the winery’s best wines.  The chef was French, the winemaker American, and one of my dinner companions someone who has lived on three continents.  A satisfying evening.

I have to count all of the pumpkins in this bin.  Let’s see, one…..

 A beautiful day at Avila Barn.  There is nothing as beautiful as October on the coast.  The sky is blue, the fog is hiding, and the apples and grapes are all being harvested.  Here’s a favorite poem by Helen Hunt Jackson:

October’s Bright Blue Weather 

O sun and skies and clouds of June
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October’s bright blue weather;

When loud the bumblebee makes haste,
Belated, thriftless vagrant,
And goldenrod is dying fast,
And lanes with grapes are fragrant;

When gentians roll their fringes tight,
To save them for the morning,
And chestnuts fall from satin burs
Without a sound of warning;

When on the ground red apples lie
In piles like jewels shining,
And redder still on old stone walls
Are leaves of woodbine twining;

When all the lovely wayside things
Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
And in the fields, still green and fair,
Late aftermaths are growing;

When springs run low, and on the brooks
In idle, golden freighting,
Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush
Of woods, for winter waiting;

When comrades seek sweet country haunt
By twos and twos together,
And count like misers hour by hour
October’s bright blue weather.

O sun and skies and flowers of June,
Count all your boasts together,
Love loveth best of all the year
October’s bright blue weather.

What do you get when 25,00 thousand or so monarch butterflies come to spend the winter in a ecalyptus grove just a few miles from the Red Door? This morning I saw the first monarchs tasting the oregano plants in my butterfly garden.  Who doesn’t like Italian food?  It is a sure sign that the seasons are changing when the butterflies stop by on their yearly migration. The first time I visited the grove, I thought the trees had an unusual number of orange leaves.  Then I realized those were the butterflies hanging on the leaves.  What a sight.  Then there is butterfly sex…..doing it in the air.

To learn all about the butterflies, check out the resources at monarchbutterfly.org

This was the weekend of the beautiful I Madonnari Italian street art festival in San Luis Obispo.  Using chalk, artists create works of art on the blacktop streets around the San Luis Mission. The festival is a charity event (see link) which supports children’s art.  Nice to see someone is.   I hear they don’t have a fill-in-the-bubble test about the  arts as part of the No Child Left Behind Act. Too bad, it might help protect arts education in our schools.

The festival featured everything from Farside cartoons to Diego Rivera. It was a windy day and every so often a cloud of multicolored chalkdust would waft over the onlookers.  I went on Saturday and Sunday to watch the artists work and then to see the finished projects.

My personal favorite was hosted by the local PFLAG chapter and was a celebration of all things rainbow.  It was so joyful and such an amazing use of color.  Here is a series of shots of one of the images as it developed over the two days.  Bellissima!