Chocolate-covered Bird Rock

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

When my sons were teenagers, we would fantasize about what we wished would move into the large, derelict property on the northeast corner of La Jolla Boulevard and Midway.  Many years ago, a seafood restaurant had prospered there, but its owner, Tom Doyle, developed a brain tumor and died. Other restaurants later moved in, but none made a go of it. The boys dreamed of someone turning the building into a computer-game store; in my wildest reveries it became a movie theater (fat chance!). Instead it stood in ruins, a shameful contrast to other happy transformations taking place along the boulevard.

Last year, word spread that the owners of the Bird Rock Surf Shop were leaving their smaller quarters a block north and moving in. Over the course of months, the renovations included repairs both inside and out, nice plantings, restriping of the newly blacktopped parking lot. The shop opened for business in January, and although surfwear and boards aren’t something my gamer sons care about (and I don’t spend much time in the water either), at least the community now has a portal to be proud of.

While browsing there the other day, I was bemused to reflect that never once did I fantasize about someone opening a chocolate shop on the premises. This is odd because chocolate is the overlord of desserts in my personal gustatory pantheon; a welcome treat at any time of the day. Even more bizarrely, I failed to react when someone did open a chocolate shop within easy walking distance of my house. That would be the Chocolate Haus at 947 Turquoise Street, which opened more than a half dozen years ago. I’m not sure how long it took me to notice it, but when I finally did, I simply couldn’t believe it would succeed. The storefront was inconspicuous, the street not-so-heavily traveled, the parking not great. So I mentally wrote it off, assuming it would soon disappear.

Years passed, but with it shuttered in my mind, I ceased to  pay attention to its presence in the street. Then during a Taste of North Pacific Beach a year or so ago, I was reminded that the Chocolate Haus was still very much in business. Moreover, it dawned on me that it probably had survived because the homemade bonbons crafted on the premises are extraordinary. Among the flavors, you can find standard caramels and dark chocolates (Nirvana is the shop’s top seller) but also interesting combinations such as lavender/berry, Meyer lemon/thyme, mocha/Kahlua, cherry/balsamic. All the ice cream is homemade too, and there’s an ice cream happy hour daily from 3 to 4. I’m still pinching myself as a reminder that I’m not dreaming — and that I need to buy these goodies for me and my loved ones often. 

Because my pessimism caused me to miss out on the Chocolate Haus’s treats for so long, I tried to not repeat that mistake when Everybody Luvs Chocolate opened last November on La Jolla Boulevard (across from the wonderful Bird Rock Coffee Roasters). I made a note to check it out promptly –but then the shop closed for structural modifications. Owner Rich Ehmke finally re-opened in March, and I stopped in recently to chat with him.

Rather than  classic confections like those being created at the Chocolate Haus, Ehmke is offering slightly more offbeat treats that make sense when you hear the back story. He says he was at a local street fair, stuck in an endless line waiting for a freshly dipped ice cream bar, when it occurred to him that the business of satisfying peoples’ appetites for chocolate novelties was strong. Ehmke had been working in the equipment-financing business, where he says the folks he dealt with were almost always in a bad mood. When the recession struck, he decided to change careers and open a shop that took the concept of candy-coated edibles to new heights.

Among the items that he drenches in Belgian chocolate are obvious ones like strawberries, apples, and marshmallows, but he also makes chocolate-covered Twinkies, New York-style cheesecake, pretzels, churros, pineapple pieces, Mrs. Fields’ cookies, oreos, bananas, and bacon. The crowds aren’t lined up into the street yet, but he says word of mouth is growing. Better still, in a chocolate shop, “No one’s ever mad.”

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Guppy love

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

I was not among the thousands who flocked to Balboa Park yesterday for the annual Earth Day celebration. What drew me there was the Fancy Guppy Show being held in Room 104 of the Casa del Prado. I’d heard that it was one of only 6 International Fancy Guppy Association-sanctioned shows being held this year, and the only one on West Coast. Had I ever seen a fancy guppy?  I couldn ‘t remember.

Along with mollies, ordinary guppies are the standard stock of fish tanks across America. But it takes careful breeding, I learned, to produce the lovely colors and shapes that win prizes at an event like this one. Here are a few that caught my eye among the hundreds being shown during the weekend:


If the fish are flashy, their humans owners are not. This was an insular event, with not so much as a flyer available to explain the joys of fancy guppy breeding to any outsider who might wander in. A friendly member of the San Diego Guppy Club was happy to answer my questions, though. He explained that prices ranging from a dollar to $120 were common at guppy auctions like the one held Sunday morning. A typical auction item might consist of one, two, or even three fish, and females could produce anywhere from just a few eggs to many dozens.

After getting my fill of guppy lore, I did wander for a while around the Prado and Plaza de Panama, where I was thunderstruck to realize that not only had I never been to a fancy guppy show before, I’d never been to the annual Earth Day party in Balboa Park.  I don’t know how I missed this. Maybe the crowds and parking crush seemed too daunting. Maybe I thought I’d seen enough booths touting recycling and solar heating to last me a lifetime. But there was so much more!  A member of the San Diego Beekeeping Society explained what it takes to maintain a backyard hive (thus helping me to conclude this is one hobby I must resist at least until retirement). I discussed mixing palm trees and California native plants with local members of the California Native Plant Society, and I learned how to recognize the Asian citrus psyllid, should any of the nasty fellows show up on the leaves of my orange tree. I was instructed in how leg hair could be removed without using razors or chemicals, and I sampled a chocolate snack drink alleged to contain both vitamins, anti-oxidants, and energy-boosting powers.

Perhaps most surprising was how prominently the topic of religion figured. Two fellows at the entrance to the California Building plaza strongly warned against the consequences of 

 

not embracing Jesus, but San Diego Pagan Pride representatives were sharing a different message (as well as distributing fliers on topics including Pagans in the Workplace — A Guide for Managers and Human Resource Directors.) No group seemed to have a more central or livelier presentation than the San Diego Coalition of Reason, with their abundant supplies of happy atheistic buttons and bumper stickers and a eager questioners. 

I ran out of time to take it all in. But I’ve already put it on my calendar for next year.

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About 10 inches

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

For years, I’ve told visiting tourists that the coastal region of San Diego gets “about 10 inches” of rain per year.  As an approximation, that’s true enough. But I’ve always felt a bit guilty about not being more precisely accurate.

So I was relieved to read Robert Krier’s recent in-depth explanation in the Union-Tribune of where that average rainfall number comes from.  I’d always figured that since rainfall totals vary from year to year, the  average should change annually too (though not by much if you’ve got more than 150 years of data, as San Diego meteorologists do). Krier explained, however, that the World Meteorological Organization’s system for establishing “climate normals” doesn’t work that way. The U.S. National Climatic Data Center only adds up the totals after each year ending in a “0″ — and then it adds up the numbers only for the past 30 years.  Thus for the last ten years, 10.77 inches was considered to be San Diego’s average rainfall. But the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s (from whence that 10.77 figure derived) were fairly wet, as decades go.

In contrast, from 2001 through 2010 we got an average of just 8.61 inches per year. So when officials in June announce the new averages (which count the numbers from the last 10 years but not those of the ’70s), our average will be just 10.33 inches.

That’s still “about 10 inches” in my book, but I’ll be careful to point out how deceptive rainfall averages can be. The most recent decade included the driest year in San Diego’s history (3.02 inches in ’01-’02), as well as the 4th driest (3.85 in ’06-’07). But we also got the third most rain on record in ’04-’05, when Lindbergh Field received 22.49 inches. One sopping year can skew the numbers. “Only 12 of the previous 30 years in San Diego were wetter than the new average of 10.33 inches,” Krier points out. For that reason, it’s been suggested that median rainfall (the number with as many inches above it as below) might provide more perspective. That number for the last 30 years is 9.6 inches.

From Krier’s piece, I also learned that a strong El Nino pattern in the Pacific hasn’t developed since ’97-’98 — a big reason the last decade turned out to be the third driest ever. I took some comfort in reading that excessively parched decades have been a feature of San Diego’s weather history for a long time. (The ’60s were the second driest with an average of 8.42 inches, and the driest ever 10-year-period was in the 1890s (7.95 inches).

This season’s unexpectedly abundant rains here and heavy snow in the Rockies have also cheered me – but then I read the Wall Street Journal‘s March 31 update on Lake Mead (“the West’s largest and most important reservoir.”) Although it’s rising now “for only the second time since the Southwest entered a debilitating drought 12 years ago,” and the water level is expected to be more than 20 feet higher by the end of September, that’s “nowhere near enough to make up for the dozen-year deficit,” according to the Journal. The reservoir is still “perilously near the level of 1,075 feet at which the U.S. Secretary of the Interior would likely declare a water shortage.” That’s never happened in the history of the Colorado River system. I’m hoping that overdue El Nino is on the way.

I’m not expecting that my rain gauge (left) will get another workout this spring.  But what will the fall bring?

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Balboa Barks

Posted on April 9, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

The forecast of wind and rain for this morning had a lot of dog lovers worrying, but they needn’t have. The sun shone upon Balboa Barks, the annual fundraiser for the Canine Companions for Independence (CCI) organization. Because I’m a CCI puppy raiser, my pup Darby and I were there to perform with the CCI Puppy Drill team. We had a great time, and it looked like most of the other folks and their furry friends who were in attendance were in a good mood too.

Some scenes from the gathering:

CCI graduates were on hand to testify about how much the dogs can do to make life better.

While the labradors, goldens, and lab/golden crosses used by CCI were much in evidence, the crowd included dogs of every size and color.

Everyone enjoyed the tasty treat samples.

Performing disk dogs provided some of the entertainment.

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A Confectionary Destination

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but although I’ve lived in San Diego for 37 of the 90 years the Wisteria Cottage has been in business, I’d never made it there until just last week.  This is NOT because I dislike candy. Rather, the confectioner is about 70 miles east of the coast, about 5 minutes off the I-8 exit that leads to the tiny town of Boulevard.

It’s also true that the backcountry candy shop has been closed more than it’s been open since the summer of 2008. The town’s newsletter reported then that owner Dana Eacobellis was shuttering the shop because she’d been unable to buy out her two sisters’ share of the property. Once a one-room schoolhouse, the cottage became a candy shop in 1921 and was acquired in 1950 by Eacobellis’s grandmother, Luz Brown. (She’d begun working there in the 1940s, according to the Boulevard Business Corner article.)

The reopening of the candy shop was announced by the Union-Tribune in early 2009 with the explanation that Eacobellis had “worked out the financial issues with her family that forced her to close the store…” But the shop closed again at some point, for reasons that Eacobellis didn’t seem eager to air when we stopped in last week.

No matter. The business re-opened again this past February, and the friends with whom I was traveling seemed to think it looked as good as ever. (They’re among the hordes who over the years considered a detour through Boulevard a mandatory part of any family trip east on I-8.)

It looks very good indeed — an archetypally charming country candy store like you might see in a children’s book set in an older and sweeter time. Peppermint and other pretty sticks fill the windows, and assorted candy turtles and peanut brittles tempt visitors behind the counter. But chocolate, in all its varieties, figures most prominently in the shop. Eacobellis says it all comes from Burlingame-based chocolatier Guittard, (the best in the world in her opinion) before being transformed into Wisteria’s hand-made bonbons. 

Eacobellis adds that her son Joe is now creating confections alongside her, making the shop a fourth-generational business, and offering hope for a long future. I hope that’s the case.  The truffles that we bought were delicious; I’d like to make that particular detour again.

The shop’s address is 39961 Old Highway 80, Boulevard, and it’s now open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day but Tuesday.

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Freeway Love

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

With a new puppy in the house, my Travels in San Diego have been somewhat curtailed of late, but Steve and I couldn’t resist making the drive out to Santee this past Saturday morning for the chance to frolic on some brand-new freeway.  We’d heard from a friend that Caltrans and the San Diego Association of Governments were hosting a community celebration of the completion of the last segment of SR 52 connecting I-5 with SR 67 (which runs through Lakeside and up to Ramona).  Normal traffic won’t begin to roll over the new road for a couple more days, so this was once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for runners, strollers, and folks on bicycles to claim the right of way. 

It all felt so retro — like back in the days where we Californians worshipped our freeways and ignored (willfully or blindly) their dark sides (e.g. the fact that this 3.5-mile stretch cost more than a half a billion dollars.)  High school marching bands were playing, vintage cars from the 50s and 60s were parked in one section, and I saw at least one Elvis impersonator, glad-handing

passersby. All manner of booths were set up, but the crowd was so thick (it looked like thousands) that we gave up on trying to walk through it. 

Instead we rode our bikes for about a mile or so west of where the crowds congregated, along with a motley crew that included everyone from preschoolers wearing oversized, bubble-gum pink helmets to gray-bearded pot-bellied biker types. It also struck me that this was the last time this space would have any human scale.  The freeway had already gobbled up the ground. The cars would soon claim the concrete at speeds that would pulverize any pedestrian.  But in these fleeting moments, humans still counted for something here. 

Another thing we noticed as we biked along was that the road surface didn’t look as virginal as we’d expected. While no oil or other automotive drips had yet darkened it, we had to wonder about the state of American construction craftsmanship.  We saw apparent patches and wondered why the grooving in the concrete varied so much; why aggregate was clearly visible in some spots while not in others.

The view from this stretch of road is nothing to travel out to Santee for. But we’re betting it will shave more than a few minutes off our trips to Julian. I also imagine the La Jolla surfers will have still more competition for those waves from their East County brethren.

Typical view from the new road

Posted in San Diego Sights, Transportation | Tagged | 2 Comments

Hard Choice

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

I finally made it out to Julian Hard Cider’s tasting room the other day; finally tasted the eponymous brew that the local company has been marketing for about a  year. The color surprised me. As you can see, it looks more like champagne than apple juice, but then again it doesn’t taste much like apple juice either.  Although nearly 7% alcohol by volume, it also doesn’t taste very intoxicating. Instead, the adjectives that came to my mind included “light” and “refreshing.” The more rueful thought was: “So many things to drink; so little time!” Given the number of boutique breweries producing superlative craft beers in San Diego County and my pre-existing devotion to wine, how can I make a regular place for hard cider on my table?

Still, the history in of hard cider in America is so long and colorful, I’m delighted to see its return to some larders. Julian Hard Cider’s website offers a small sip of that history, pointing out (among other things) that all the colonists drank it, “old and young, and in all places — funerals, weddings, ordainings, vestry-meetings, church-raisings, etc.” Infants drank mulled hard cider at night, and students at Harvard and Yale passed two-quart tankards “from hand to hand down the commons table.” Old men quaffed a quart or more of the stuff before breakfast.

The website blames the introduction of German beer “with its faster fermentation process” for the older beverage’s initial decline, and Prohibition dealt it a near death blow. But it reportedly has been making a comeback, with the Julian product being singled out as among the best. (The October 2010 issue of Sunset called it “a knockout.”)

Sadly, although Julian 100 years ago was practically synomymous with apple cultivation, the town’s orchards no longer produce enough fruit to supply owner Paul Thomas’s needs. (Already offered at a number of local restaurants and markets, the cider is also being distributed by Stone Brewing Co. across Southern California.) So Thomas has been using apples grown, picked, fermented, and bottled in Oregon. He hopes to use local apples again some day, if production can be ramped up.

But even if Julian Hard Cider is only being sold and marketed locally, a visit to the tasting room makes a nice addition to the somewhat limited list of Reasons to Visit Julian. Located in Wynola Farms Marketplace, in a replica of a miner’s saloon, it’s open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. (Call 760-765-2500 to confirm that.)

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Three Mil and Counting

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

One of the tough parts about living in a place like San Diego (or, for that matter, Earth) where the population keeps climbing is keeping track of what the current numbers are. When I moved to San Diego County in 1974, the total number of (county) inhabitants was about 1.5 million.  Now comes the announcement that the 2010 census recorded almost 3.1 million of us here.  

It helps to have a ready reference to it all at one’s fingertips.  So I appreciated the Voice of San Diego’s inclusion this morning of a cool interactive map of state and national trends.  (You get some county data too if you hover the cursor over San Diego.)  I haven’t yet poked around in the online database, but it’s nice to know it’s here when I need it. The Union-Tribune’s report this morning is another good reference.

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Who Could EAT One?

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

I’ve never been to one of the San Diego Cake Club’s show competitions before, but after what I saw yesterday, I’ve already put it on my calendar to attend next year’s event.  Founded 30 years ago, the club says it stages the largest show of its kind in California.  (Which makes me wonder: are there states that put on bigger ones?)

I actually missed most of the action, which unfolded over both Saturday and Sunday and included demonstrations in various cake decorating styles, candy making, cookie decorating, gum-paste flower fabrication, and more — all culminating in a Sunday afternoon awards ceremony honoring the creme de la creme among the local confectioners.

Here’s just a small sampling of the amazing creations that were on display:

Some of the cakes were standouts for their elegance.

Others wowed me with their creativity.

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On Top of Old Mt. Miguel

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Jeannette De Wyze

I tend to think of Jerry Schad as a god, omniscient about all good hiking trails in Southern California. So I was shocked when it was recently pointed out to me that His Bible (Afoot and Afield in San Diego County) includes no information about hiking up Mt. Miguel. It’s such a landmark. If you’ve ever driven south on I-5 and have glanced off to your left as you pass through Chula Vista, you’ve seen it looming to the east, the summit bristling with telecommunication towers. Or you might have seen it on approach to Lindbergh Field — maybe not quite as much a sign of returning to San Diego as the California Tower in Balboa Park — but close.

Photographs by Howard Rosen

So when a couple of friends invited Steve and me along on a hike up Mt. Miguel last Sunday, we happily accepted. We met at a Bonita shopping center then carpooled to the trailhead, driving east on Proctor Valley Road (the eastern extension of H Street in Chula Vista). On Coastal Hills Drive, we turned left (north).  After about a half mile, we came to an intersection with Butterfly Court to the right and Iron Gate Lane to the left.  We turned left and almost immediately saw a gate on the left side of the road. We parked and just past the gate climbed a paved section of road for about 200 feet. That became becomes dirt, and about 400 feet later, it made a 90-degree turn to the left, continuing on to an intersection guarded by a  electrical transmission tower.  We turned right… and  followed the dirt trail all the way to the summit.

Everything growing along the way is low and inconspicuous, but I have to confess I also wasn’t paying any attention to it because I was chatting away — and breathing hard. The elevation gain is about 1700 feet over a distance that I’d estimate to be about two miles. It felt like an excellent workout — one with almost no tricky footing. The scenic payoff is at the top, with splendid views of Sweetwater Reservoir, Lower Otay Lake, Jamul to the southeast and downtown San Diego to the north.

One small disappointment is that you can’t go quite all the way to the peak; serious fences, topped with razor wire, guard all those mysterious towers at the very top. Because of the storm that had just passed through, the entire eastern vista were more densely, snowily white than any time in my recent memory.  We even saw small patches of ice at our feet. But any time of year, a trip to the top of this mountain would be rewarding.

Posted in The Natural World | Tagged , | 2 Comments