Festas 2007
Every year the portuguese community organizes a festa (pronounces fesh-ta) in Newark,CA. The parade starts at 10 AM and circles the block, carrying with it musicians, dancers and even livestock. The parade ends at the pavilion where one can indulge in Portuguese food games and entertainment. In the evening a traditional Portuguese meal called soupas is served. Rows of tables are filled with people eating drinking and socializing. The video below taken on Jul 12 2007 is from the midway point of the parade (my parent's house).
Lemon chicken
I clearly remember my years growing up around moonshine stills. Stills are of course illegal in the state of California (where this blog is presently hosted) so the name and location of this still will remain undisclosed. The still consisted of a pressure cooker that contained the material that would be evaporated, in this case homemade wine. The evaporate would travel out the top of the pressure cooker through a copper coil which twisted through a bucket of chilled water which would condense the vapor back into a liquid. What you ended up with was essentially liquid alcohol. From what I've read, the liquid starts off with a couple tablespoons of toxic alcohol, and the rest if potable. I'm not sure if my relative understood this subtlety. "Parts per million" he'd tell me, "parts per million." Mix that magic up with some passion fruits and you have a tasty little nectar that makes a young boy find love at the bottom of a bottle. It is important to note that it can be tricky, once you've reached the bottom of the bottle to remove the evidence by pouring water back in. Also, important is the fact that the water no matter how much you swish it around, never carries quite the same potency. Anyway I digress.
In the still, when you're done evaporating all the good stuff out of the wine, what's left is this nasty, nasty mess. It's so nasty that the smell of it can make one hurl. So the question is, what do you do with all that gunk? This relative, the clever conservationist that he is (you see, he was trendy well before his time) decided to use it as topsoil for his citrus tree. This same tree used to produce the strangest looking fruit. I remember on at least one occasion being passed a "finger" from a lemon that looked exactly like a human hand. The one in the photo above bears a striking resemblance to a small bird. There were all sorts of weird shapes in between. Now would be a good time to mention, that I know absolutely nothing of horticulture or of chemistry. Admittedly, I'm tying these facts together in a very unscientific manner. All I know is that the tree that received the grog booster and the tree with the funky shaped lemons were one and the same.