Borrowed Kitchens: Alexia's Granparents' Beach House, Cambria, CA

Post by Lara

For our second "Borrowed Kitchens" post, we stopped along the California coast in beautiful Cambria, where our friend Alexia's grandparents have a beach house.  When we first heard "beach house in California," we thought of hot sun and white sand with warm waves lapping up the shore.  Well, the waves were there-- just about everything else was a bit different.  The Central California coast is not warm, and it's not terribly sandy-- but the tide pools created by the big rocks on the shoreline are very interesting-- full of hermit crabs, sea anemones, and snails.

 For our first ever dinner on the Pacific coast, we thought seafood would be fitting. We picked up some Albacore tuna steaks and cruised up to the beach house with a cooler full of vegetables from Vegas. Alexia and her sister Carina helped us prepare dinner.

Tuna steaks rubbed with salt, black pepper, and cayenne before broiling

Cauliflower and Brussels sprouts before roasting

Lemon slices for our tuna steaks

Cheddar cheese makes everything more delicious

Our dinner of tuna and roasted veggies was just perfect for our first evening on the Pacific.  The following night, we went a bit less healthy and grabbed individual slices of pie from Linn's, a famous bakery in Cambria, and ate it on the beach.  We have no regrets whatsoever.

Before leaving Cambria, we had to stop over at Hearst Castle for a quick look at what I can only describe as one of the classiest over-the-top mansions we've ever had the pleasure of being allowed into, and we were treated to an absolutely fabulous day on top of the 'Enchanted Hill'.  We also got to see a herd of zebras leftover from Hearst's menagerie-- though I wasn't quick enough to snap a photo.

 Next stop: Sacramento (after a winding climb up the coast through Big Sur).

Favorite Conveniences

Hi everyone! This is just a super quick post to update you on what's up with us at the moment. We are in Seattle after a 2000+ mile long road trip, during which we managed to meet up with 4 former volunteers from PC Sierra Leone. During our wanderings we've talked to our fellow returned volunteers about readjusting to American life after Peace Corps.

Here's a small list of the conveniences we've rediscovered and learned to appreciate in a new light:

- Even "bad" roads are nicer than what we're used to.
- Potable water is everywhere. Some of it doesn't taste good, but none of it will give us dysentery!
- We can drink all the water we want, just about whenever we want, because there are public restrooms everywhere.
- 4G. Wow.

There you go. Probably our shortest post ever.

Borrowed Kitchens, Part 1: Cheryl's in Las Vegas

Post by Lara

If you've been following our Facebook pages, you'll know Kevin and I officially closed our Peace Corps service last week and returned to the US. And unless you've been living under a rock, you will have heard that all 300+ Peace Corps volunteers and trainees have been temporarily removed from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea as a precaution related to the ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa. I may write a post on all that craziness later...but for now just know that we are safe, sad to leave Salone, and happy to be back in the USA. 

Now, on to today's topic:

As this is the first and maybe only chance we will have to take a month off and go do some interesting things while having no one to answer to, we're on a road trip! We start in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada, where Kevin's sister Cheryl just got married. We got a chance to house/dog sit for a few days, and as such we got to cook in a real, fully equipped kitchen! As we anticipate we will get to do this a few more times in the next few weeks, we decided this is a great chance to write a little series on what we like to cook when we can cook ANYTHING.We started off this meal with a trip to Walmart where we had so many choices, we nearly collapsed.  Since the only squash in Sierra Leone is pumpkin, and it's almost autumn, we decided a nice acorn squash would do great.  After that, we kind of just ran with that idea.  Here's what happened:

We chopped up some onion, celery, pepper, and carrot and tossed it with walnuts, bacon bits, raisins, olive oil, chicken stock, cumin and cinnamon.

After baking the squash by itself for 30 minutes, we added the above mixture and baked it some more! It popped and sizzled for 10 minutes or so after we removed it from the oven.

YUM

A side salad and some cheesy garlic bread rounded out our meal. Kevin washed his dinner down with Blue Moon pumpkin ale-- a bit early for fall, but we feel it's fair since we missed autumn two years in a row. 

 

There you have it! dinner came together in about an hour and 15 minutes. Not bad for a couple who used to take an hour just getting from no fire to hot charcoal!  Tomorrow we may mix up all our leftover squash and veggies into a pasta dish, or serve it in a fall-themed salad.  Stay tuned for more Borrowed Kitchen meals!