It's another icky hot summer day here in Cleveland, when all I really want to eat is ice cream. We've been sampling the various ice cream novelty treats, from Klondikes to lemon ice to things on sticks, but so far I can't pass up a Drumstick. It's ice cream! In a cone! With a chocolate coating! Brilliant.

Most of them are coated in poison (Foodgoat tells me I'm missing something wonderful in the peanut-ice cream combination), so my personal range of choices from that line are somewhat limited. Still, I can have the cookies and cream flavor, and the mint looks very promising. Skip the triple chocolate though - I think just being near it causes diabetes, and besides, it lacks that chococate shell that's so satisfying to break through.

Sorry, Moe's, but Pierside Seafood Restaurant has officially replaced you as my favorite place to eat in Pismo Beach.

Not only does it have a far more pleasant eating area with a shady but scenic view of the beach, but it has "Tubes and Tentacles" and "Tubes and Chips" specials on the menu, allowing me to have calamari as both an appetizer and an entree.

Who could turn down a dish with the word "tentacles" in it?

Oh Say Can You Calamansi

By far the most exciting find at the garden centers this year is the calamansi tree (labelled as a calamondin). It's native to the Philippines and makes bitsy limey-orangey things which are are the perfect size for squirting onto food. My little tree will never make enough to keep me supplied in calamansi juice (my sure-fire cure for sore throats, colds, and all that ails you), but for me, a calamansi tree is like a piano - a house isn't a Filipino home until it has one. So far it is happily fruiting in the backyard, untouched by the deer or the groundhog (luckily for them: hell hath no fury like a gardener whose calamansi has been pilfered). I was told it should do fine overwintering inside my cold house, but I'm not so sure, so I'm enjoying it while it lasts.

Respect the boundaries!

After two years, four plants, many stubby stems, and an ongoing battle for resources with the local deer, I present to you the first, and thus far, only raspberry I have produced for our own consumption.

The cost-benefit ratio of home gardening is not working out in my favor.

Tonight Sienna and I begin a daily patrol around the property at dusk.

Well, how's a blogger supposed to follow that?

Before we dive headlong into a year or so of wedding pie selections and whether the lechon should be served at the reception, my week in California included other developments aside from the sparkly-sparkly kind. For one thing, my brother graduated from UCLA.


For another, while we were in town, I was introduced to Westwood's famous Diddy Riese Cookies.


Each time we walked by, there was a line at least fifteen deep that trailed down the street. But if you are patient, at the end you can buy one delicious, freshly made cookie for only 35 cents. Or you can get two cookies with ice cream packed in between them. Yummy.

Or you can get a cookie and a hot dog and have yourself a dinner for about a buck fifty.