Mio enthusiastically enjoys a pesto pasta lunch, featuring her happy food dance.
When you get reactions like this, it makes all the cooking and food prep worth it! I love my pasta lovin’, messy eater of a daughter. ♥
Foodie Love
Eat Real Festival
Last weekend was Oakland’s Eat Real Festival, where 60 street food vendors, along with craft food market vendors, artisan producers, and culinary instructors rolled into Jack London Square to serve up delicious eats (all $5 or under!) and hold workshops and demonstrations. The festival ran from Friday through Sunday, but we spent our Saturday afternoon at the festival. It was our first time there, and we were a bit overwhelmed by how crazy the crowds were, how long some lines stretched, and how much time was spent waiting in them. (It probably didn’t help that we went at what was most likely the busiest time of the whole three days.) The whole experience probably would have been a little less stressful without having to maneuver the stroller through the gravel and throngs of foodies that descended upon the festival, but we still had a good time and got to indulge our palates!
Among some of the delectable food we tried: Hapa SF, CurryUpNow, Cholita Linda, Fat Face, and Scream Sorbet.
Ice Ice Baby
Last night, I was eating some sherbet in an ice cream cone when Mio suddenly started trying to grab at my treat. I don’t know if it was the colorful colors (it was watermelon-flavored, so it was bright green and red), or how deliciously I was eating it, but no matter how much I’d try to pull it away, she’d keep going for it.
I suppose this is one of those signs that they tell you to watch for of when your baby is ready to start solids, but Dan and I are on the fence. We had been thinking of waiting until Mio turned six months, since we read that starting solids on the earlier side can lead to a higher risk of the child developing food allergies as well as obesity issues later in life. For now, we’re thinking of sticking with our plan to not introduce solids until she’s closer to six months of age. She will have decades to eat lots of yummy food, so waiting a couple more months shouldn’t hurt.
For now, Mio will just have to be satisfied with milk and attempts to eat her stuffed animals:
On a completely unrelated note, here are a couple photos of Mio playing with some of her older toddler friends this past weekend:
Berkeley Bowl West
The famous Berkeley Bowl is nothing short of a foodie mecca, garnering national coverage and regularly gracing the pages of newspapers like The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. We live only about a half mile away from its location on Oregon Street, and it is definitely one of the biggest perks of living in Berkeley. Some people travel several miles to do their grocery shopping here, because it seems to carry just about everything, including obscure international ingredients. I was psyched when I found that I could buy mostly everything for my Japanese cooking needs instead of having to make the hour-long trek down to Mitsuwa in San Jose. While the produce is the freshest in the area and the selection is unmatched, the shopping experience there is a whole different story and was the only thing keeping us from coming back every weekend. As the SF Gate reported, “The parking lot is a gridlocked swamp of road rage, a demolition derby of Priuses and rusty old Volvos vying for parking spots… The produce section is often described as the ‘Cairo of shopping carts,’ as dozens of very focused and aggressive gourmands fight over the purple potatoes and fresh water chestnuts. The checkout lines can be staggering, like something out of East Berlin.” The zoo that is Berkeley Bowl provides you with the most exhausting — although rewarding — shopping experience ever.
Berkeley Bowl was in desperate need of expansion with the shortage of parking spots and cramped aisles, and our prayers were answered with the opening of Berkeley Bowl West in early June of this year. Located near the intersection of San Pablo and Ashby Avenues, right off the freeway, it features a parking garage and double the number of parking spaces of the Oregon Street store, more checkout lanes, and significantly larger aisles and produce sections to accommodate the swarming crowds of shoppers. It also boasts a cafe, expanded kitchen, and community room where people can take a seat and immediately enjoy any prepared food they purchase.
Dan and I took a trip out to the new Berkeley Bowl West early last month when it had just opened, and we were super impressed! We’ll let the photos do the talking:
I commend you if you have gotten this far in this photo dump of a blog entry, and I hope you enjoyed our dorktastic photo tour. All hail Berkeley Bowl West, the new foodie paradise! We’re sure we will be seeing much more of you.