a busy start to spring

i've slowly been making invisible progress on my new shelving project.

yesterday i went to macbeath hardwood company and i picked up 38 board feet of rough four quarter soft maple in ten foot long boards of assorted widths for $155. leading up to this purchase i spent a lot of time researching the terminology related to buying lumber, finding different lumber suppliers near me, and balancing the properties of different the woods and their cost. i finally settled on soft maple because it looks good and is reasonably cheap.

i've been designing my shelves using google sketchup, if you'd like to take look at how the shelves will look then install sketchup and click here to download my design. i'm finished with the design itself, but i'm still working on alternate views that can be used as printouts for when i'm in the garage doing the actual construction. hopefully i'll be able to start milling some of the wood next week.

sat afternoon ronda and i celebrated the arrival of spring in a time honored SF fashion, we went to the zeitgeist for burgers and beer. we met up with some of ronda's friends there and afterwards went for some martinis at martuni's.

today we did a bunch of random cooking. last weekend we cooked up three pounds of tasty corned beef from marin sun farms (our favorite meat supplier). we used half the corned beef last weekend for corned beef hash and we finished it off this weekend by making ruben sandwiches. rye bread, thinly sliced corned beef, thinly sliced swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and home made russian dressing, all cooked up in the panini press. mmmm...

after the ruben sandwiches for brunch, i tried out a new salsa recipie for papalote salsa. just in case you're not familiar with papalote, it's an awesome taqueria in the mission, and they serve a salsa that's more addictive than crack. i have to say the version that i made isn't exactly the same, but it's really freakin good.

i also wanted to make (but never got around to making) some sikil p'ak. i normally buy little $6 tubs of this stuff at the farmers market from primavera. the problem is that the little tub never last past two sittings (if it makes it that long). so i did some digging around on the internet and i came up with this recipie for sikil p'ak. i bought all the ingredients and hopefully i'll be able to try it soon.

since i was on a salsa kick, i also created a peppers file as a convenient reference for all my pepper cooking needs.

i also went roasted the second half of a 3 lb lutz beet that i picked up last weekend at the farmers market from tierra vegetables. i had never heard of or seen a lutz beet before, but tierra is one of my favorite people at the farmers market often times i'll just buy whatever they bring just to try it out. i roasted the beet by cutting it up into 1" square strips, putting it in a tray with 3/4 cup water and some olive oil, covering it with foil, and sticking it into the oven at 350 F for one and quarter hours. after that i pulled the skin off and cut it into chunks so that ronda and i can have it later during the week.