Midweek local dinner, break fast edition

Also, a desperate attempt to make a dent in the vegetables before the next round arrives this afternoon....

• dry-fried green beans* with sea salt
  
• cabbage* sauteed with bits of carrot* in olive oil and panch phoron
  
• beets* with carrots* (cooked with a bit of water)
  
• white/white wheat flatbreads (King Arthur flour, Norwich, VT) with butter (Cabot Creamery, Cabot, VT)
  
• sauteed broccoli*, carrot*, scallion*, red onion*, and seitan (The Bridge, Middletown, CT), with a sauce of soy-nut butter (Simple Food, Amesbury, MA) mixed with Szechuan spicy sauce

* farm share, Red Fire Farm, Granby, MA

What's left from last week's share: parsley, cucumbers, lettuce, some cabbage
Porch harvest update: 22 red grape tomatoes, 11 Sungolds

Sacramento notes

Best food find: Santander 70% dark chocolate with passion fruit, wonderfully sour (with an oval hechsher from the rabbanut "mem-dalet-yod-yod-nun", which I keep reading as "Midian." Anyone know this one?)

General feel: not a large city. There aren't a lot of pedestrians around, there aren't any supermarkets downtown. There is a lot of public art, though, small pieces as well as large. And a grid system is always easier to figure out while traveling (letters from north to south, numbers from west to east, and addresses based on which block they were in, which I've read about but never noticed in action before.), though I found it a bit strange to have large-ish blocks that were completely square.

What is 4($.26)? $1.46, if you're buying four postcard stamps in the hotel lobby. I never thought to check whether they'd mark up stamps.

The hotel I stayed in overlooked the state house and its garden, which was beautiful. I got up early enough on my last day to fit in a walk through it, looking at all the glorious ( trees. )

The park has some other features, including the world peace rose garden (many of the flowers past their peak, alas); a small cactus garden (some of them fruiting) with a butia capitata; a haunting Vietnam memorial with many sculptures (some coming out of an etched vertical background, some lower reliefs), also a map of Vietnam, as well as lists of servicepeople (the quote nearby so simple: "All gave some. Some gave all."); a more generic California veterans memorial; a CA firefighters memorial; and a grove of trees planted in 1897 for the Civil War veterans with cuttings of plants from Civil War battlefields.

The hotel with the meetings I went to was designed by pod people; it was very confusing. (Check out 2001 Point West Way, Sacramento, CA, in satellite view on gmaps, to get an idea.)