I updated my Maps page to include some trails I’ve mapped on a site called Gmaps Pedometer. This site lets to map a route, calculating distance and calories. It even takes elevation into account! This is pretty handy for tracking my calories burned which I started doing on SparkPeople a few weeks ago. I also track my nutrition and calories consumed. At the moment my goal is to lose 10 pounds by the end of the year. My SparkPeople page is BlueValhalla.

For Earth Hour this year, Mary and I decided to make a candlelight dinner. We got a late start, so we actually had to make dinner by candlelight (picture on right). Good thing we have a gas stove. We decided to make something simple: pasta. We made some multigrain penne and a spicy red pepper sauce with chicken sausage. With that we had some left over broccoli and some raw snap peas. To top it off, we had chardonnay and some sort of German mountain cheese (I’m not sure what that means, but it was tasty). We had everything out of the fridge and ready to cook by 8:25PM. The pasta and sauce were cooking and the wine was chilling in a bucket of ice when we turned out the lights.

Dinner was ready around 8:50. We ate by candlelight (picture on left). It was quite romantic. We enjoyed it so much that we decide we should do it every week (though maybe that was the wine talking). By the time we finished of dinner (and the bottle of wine) Earth Hour was over. With the lights on there was nothing left of Earth Hour except dirty dishes and an empty bottle of wine (picture on right). We’re looking forward to doing this again next year.

There are a few more pictures in the Earth Hour 2009 gallery.

Ron and I still work on dishAdish from time to time. In fact, we’re in the process of launching dishAdish vegetarian. It’s the same layout and data as the regular dishAdish, but only displays the dishes marked as vegetarian. I think it will be an interesting feature to be able to find the best vegetarian dishes at a given restaurant.

Since last weekend Mary and I haven’t had a chance to look for the peregrines downtown. From the Yahoo Group it sounds like they are starting to venture all over San Jose, though they still seem to return to City Hall for the night.  I do have a few new pictures from last weekend in my San Jose Peregrine album.

We have been checking on the burrowing owls in Alviso near the “Magic Fence”. There are a few burrows in the fields near the fence, and at least one group of fledglings. We have seen as many as three fledgling at once. They are really cute. The burrows are really close to the road and sadly, at least one of the fledgling has been hit by a car and killed. One of the people we met through watching the falcons downtown has also been watching the burrowing owls. After the incident with the car she posted a bunch of signs around the area asking people to be more careful and watch for the owls. Fortunately now that the young are flying a bit they seem to be spending more time in the field away from the road. There are more pictures of the burrowing owls in the gallery. The albums are separated by year and the 2008 album is broken down by day.

Today, as an extension of Mary’s birthday, since she had not had a chance to celebrate it with her family yet, we went to the Scharffen Berger factory in Berkeley. Joining us were Mary’s mom, dad and brother. We had a 10:30 AM appointment for Scharffen Berger’s factory tour.

If you are not familiar with Scharffen Berger, and you like dark chocolate, you should really check them out. The company was started by Robert Steinberg and John Scharffenberger in 1996. Robert was a family physician, who was exploring new interest after a run-in with Leukemia. John had been an organic grower and wine maker, with a successful sparkling wine label, Scharffenberger Cellars, which he had sold in 1995. Together they started making chocolate in Robert’s kitchen using a toaster oven, coffee grinder, mortar and pestle, an electric mixer. They eventually opened a factory in South San Francisco, making chocolate with vintage European machinery and selling it locally. Eventually they moved to the larger facility in Berkeley. [Sources: Factory tour and Scharffen Berger — Our History]

The tour started with a brief history of the company similar to the previous paragraph. The guide also mentioned that Scharffen Berger was acquired by Hershey in 2005, and was not part of Hershey’s Artisan Confections Company (which also includes Joseph Schmidt Confections and Dagoba Organic Chocolate). To many, this may seem like a total sell-out, and in fact I have seen articles suggesting it is (see Hershey’s “White Sheep” Brand–Scharffen Berger on BusinessWeek). However, as pointed out in the tour, the Scharffen Berger operations are quite independent, and they still make chocolate the same way they have for the past decade, but now they have more money for expansion and greater distribution.

In any case, the tour was great. In addition to the company history, we learned all about the cacao plant, it’s history and variations, and how it is used to make chocolate. During this discussion, we had the chance to sample their 3 main chocolates: 70% Cacao Bittersweet, 62% Cacao Semi Sweet and 41% Cacao Rick Milk Chocolate. We also got to try some cacao nibs, which are simply cleaned, roasted, and lightly crushed cacao beans. We took a tour of the factory, though being Sunday, nothing was actually running. It was still pretty interesting to see the equipment, which is rather quaint compared to the bulk chocolate manufacturing facilities. The tour ended in the store, where we had an opportunity to sample a few more varieties, including Nibby (with cacao nibs), Mocha (with Sumatran coffee beans), and Milk Sea Salt Almond. There were also samples of their hot chocolate and ganache. As an added bonus, we got to wear some really stylish hairnets.

After the tour, we had lunch in their cafe, Cafe Cacao. They have a variety of breakfast and lunch dishes. The food was good. I had a ham omelette and we all shared some yummy sweet potato fries. Mary had a pork sandwich which was pretty good, but nothing special. After lunch we went back to the Scharffen Berger store to pick up a few items to try later. We even got a Dagoba chocolate bar with dark chocolate (74%) chiles and nibs in it. That should be interesting…

Over the Fourth of July weekend, Mary and I went to the North Coast of California to see the Redwoods (more on that to come later). On the way, we stopped in Eureka, CA for the night and had dinner at a fun little place called the Samoa Cookhouse. It’s an old lumber camp cookhouse, and they even have a bit of a logging museum (see picture in the right).

The eating area is made up of a bunch of picnic tables and chairs. Unless you have a really big group (10 or more), you will be sharing a table with other people. This is part of the fun. The food is served family style using big plates and bowls and you can get more of anything you want. However, the food is shared only within your group.

The menu is fixed for a given meal (breakfast, lunch or dinner) on a given day. When I was there they served bread (fresh baked and yummy), salad, beef barley soup, peas and corn, baked potato, fried chicken and pork steak. The fried chicken was awesome and the pork steak was sort of country style (pan fried and smotered in white gravy). They ran out of apple pie, so we had to settle for chocolate pudding. Stop there if you get a chance!