Categories
cooking

Potato Dinner

After a year long hiatus from doing my home tasting menus, I got the urge to a do a new one around the humble potato which led to last weekend Potato dinner. We have a total of 7 diners which did slow down the plating, but having done this several times I have gotten much better at managing my time and we were done with the 7 savory courses in just under 3.5 hours despite this meal including some fairly complex dishes as well as one multi-item course.

Hot Potato Cold Potato
Hot Potato Cold Potato is a classic Alinea appetizer that has a hot ball of butter poached potato that is dropped into a cold potato soup made with truffle juice.… Read the rest

Categories
cars personal

2013 Lotus Evora S IPS For Sale

Update: Car is sold

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After 3 fun years of Evora ownership I am looking for a new owner to care for my 2013 Evora S IPS. I originally purchased the car in 2015 and it served as my daily driver for 2 years and ~15k miles. The car has always been serviced by either DietschWerks or TrackSpec who are the premier independent Lotus mechanics in the Bay Area.

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I have written about the car before and can confirm my original assessment that it is a fantastic street car and serviceable on track. Luckily I have enough cars to choose from so this Evora has seen only 2 track days and has spent the rest of its life as a street car.… Read the rest

Categories
cooking thoughts

The French Laundry review

Took us 10 years to finally get a reservation
For foodies in the Bay Area, there is one fine dining place that we all have on our bucket list – The French Laundry. Nithya and I have had the pleasure of dining at Per Se and doing the French Laundry retrospective at Next, but we never managed to get reservations to the big daddy. However TFL moved to a ticket based reservation system last year and that allowed us to finally scored a dinner reservation for he birthday a few weeks ago.

Tuna tartare cornet
The first course was this cornet of tuna tartare. They usually serve this dish with Salmon tartare but this night it was tuna instead and just as delicious as before.… Read the rest

Categories
Uncategorized

Rockets Away!

Last weekend I was lucky enough to see an Atlas V rocket launch from Vandenburg AFB. We are all jaded from seeing things on video every day but I highly recommend watching a launch if you ever get a chance – it is a spectacular event and being a night launch we got a much better perspective on just how bright the exhaust gets.

More info and a much better video is available at SpaceFlightNow.… Read the rest

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Uncategorized

Autocrossing the Hellcat

Last weekend I autocrossed the Hellcat for the very first time at the GGLC AutoX in Marina. Unfortunately it was a very, very tight course which meant that I had no chance to really put the power down. My best time (below) was a 51.4 while the Elise’s were getting down in the 46-47 range.

This is definitely not something I will do again though I still do want to take it at a track day where it should do much better as they usually dont have too many rapid direction changes. Also I wish Dodge had a mode to see the current gear in big central display, the current display is so tiny that I cant really keep track of the paddle selected gear in the rapid fire autocross environment – another thing that should be better on track.… Read the rest