Gnocchi

Today was a rare and welcome off day from baseball. With our ample free time, of course we came right home and made gnocchi and tomato sauce, both from scratch, for dinner. This is the kind of crazy stuff you get to do when you don’t have kids or responsibilities.

For the tomato sauce, we had a white onion, a couple of ripe tomatoes and the ever-present garlic. I loosely followed the 15-Minute Tomato Sauce recipe from Chez Pim. I ended up having a lot of onion for the amount of tomato I had, which I really didn’t see as a problem.

Tomato sauce

Shaun has made gnocchi a few times, and I’d say this is still a work in progress for us. I followed the gnocchi recipe on 101 Cookbooks. I wouldn’t serve it to guests yet, but, you know, I’d eat it.

Gnocchis

And the apartment smells like an Italian kitchen now. Score!

Gnocchi

0 comments  ·  29 jun, 11:06 p.m.

Alcatraz

So there’s just this one thing I wanted to tell you about Alcatraz, which I learned on my tour of the island.

Indians Welcome

In 1969, after the facilities had been closed as a federal penitentiary, a group of Native Americans decided to take a stand and attempt to live the island, in protest against the land taken from them by the government. They claimed rights under an old treaty allowing them to occupy abandoned federal property.

Alcatraz Island is not a very friendly place to live. All of the occupants later left the island, but the standoff brought a lot of attention to relations between Native Americans and the US government.

Alcatraz

0 comments  ·  17 jun, 9:18 p.m.

AT&T Park

In May, Shaun and I went to San Francisco for five days, and one of the big reasons we went was to see a Braves’ road game. I’ve seen AT&T Park on TV a bunch of times, so I knew it was pretty nice.

Scoreboard

You probably already know that it’s on the water, about McCovey cove, “splash hits” and whatnot. AT&T park is a nice traditional baseball stadium, not unlike Turner Field. It has much better food that Turner Field (we have Aramark) and has a more intimate feel, seating about 10,000 fewer fans. We took a nice walk around the whole concourse level while the Braves were taking batting practice. On the other hand, the video scoreboard at Turner Field is about three times the size and our announcer is way better. We like hanging out on the concourse level behind home plate, but at AT&T park that whole area is blocked off with food stands.

Coke bottle

I wasn’t sure how going to an away game would be. Atlanta being the transplant city that it is, we get plenty of away team fans, and that works out mostly okay except for Cubs fans who are obnoxious. One guy did say “SUCKS!” after every Braves player was announced in the starting lineup, although for Jeff Francoeur we had to agree. After the game starting going south for our guys (kind of surprising giving the pitching matchup at the time), I couldn’t help but start planning my retorts in the event I was heckled.

Brian McCann

We walked the mile or so back to our hotel after the game, and a Giants fan did say something to Shaun about his Braves shirt. I feel bad about it now, but I unleashed. “Hey, at least we’re still above .500.” “How’s that division going for you?” (The Giants were/are quite a few games behind their division leader, the Dodgers, who did and still do have the best record in baseball.) Sorry, Giants. I like y’all fine, especially Tim Lincecum.

1 comment  ·  10 jun, 11:01 p.m.