Napa Porchfest

I'm still decompressing from the third annual Napa Porchfest held last Sunday, July 28. This is a labor of love for our dedicated committee, which is a standing committee of Napa County Landmarks, Inc.

Napa Porchfest 2013

 We had over 4,000 people who wandered in our Old Town neighborhoods listening to over 80

musical groups performing on 47 porches between 1 and 6 pm. Planning starts in January and goes till event day. It's a solid six month volunteer commitment. I'm a founder and chair of the event, so a lot of unusual tasks come my way. Things like making the map, being webmaster, crunching all the data, social networking, picking up T-shirts. The T-shirts are great, and co-chair Thea sold hundreds of them. Thea also has the massive task of coordinating music for all the porches. Others on the committee coordinate volunteers, handle logistics, and media and public relations. We even have a committee member who coordinates food trucks - added this year to the line-up.

 

Porchfest T-shirts disappear at the food truck round-up

 

I was inundated with texts and calls from the "hot spots", but snapped a few pictures on the run. Churchill Manor was the largest and most elegant venue we've had yet - beautiful lawn to sit on, expansive two-story porch, and great music. Everyone played for FREE, even these seasoned professionals.   

Jimmy Smith Band at Porchfest

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 There was one report of a badly stubbed toe, and one reported bee sting. As the person in charge I am greatly relieved!

Porchfest 2013 at Churchill Manor

As the afternoon waned, this idyllic spot beckoned. One of these years, when the event is well established and we really know what we are doing, I'll bring a blanket and sit right here. All this came from a conversation on Facebook. Don't believe the pundits who crow that Social Media is a waste of time. Napa is all the richer for it.

quiet nights

After walking a precinct in the sleet and rain today, the "quiet night of quiet stars" is a welcome respite. The chill makes it seem possible to have one of those thunder snow storms sometimes seen in northern California. Bossa Nova for St. Patrick's Day? Yes, of course.

I've been trying the Spotify premium service and like the ease of use, ability to create playlists, and large music library available. The jazz and classical catalogue is extensive. As a early adopter of Napster, I subscribed to their premium service when they finally went legal. The libraries seemed to shrink over time, and more and more tracks were unavailable on the playlists I had created over the years. After trying out Pandora, LastFM and other services, the Spotify interface seems to be working very well. Pandora provides an approximation of the desired music. Actual tracks cannot be played at will. It's a radio station. So far, I can recommend Spotify. I've linked Spotify to Facebook, so check out some recent tracks and playlists. It is very convenient to listen to music in the office and press the pause button when I'm on the phone.

In other internet activities, I've progressed a bit on twitter. It's possible to link the twitter feed and facebook, and on occasion I will do this when posting political news or information.

I joined google+ and it turned out to be a bust. There is not much going on behind the velvet rope. No bouncer required. I'm convinced this was a re-launch of Buzz.

Here's to St. Patrick's Day - and sister-in-law Patti's St. Patti's Day birthday!

Thanks, here's some pie

One of the projects that the Rotary Club of Napa supports is the Pathway Home. Our club hosts the annual "Cycle for Sight & Rotary Ride for Veterans". Members of our club are very involved in activities with Pathway Home veterans, including special outings, regular bowling nights, volunteering at the Veterans Home, distributing a home made quilt to each veteran, and of course raising money for this privately funded effort. Veterans in the program may have traumatic brain injuries, post traumatic stress disorder, physical injuries, and sometimes disfiguring injuries. Please click on the links to learn more about the program, and plan on riding or volunteering at the next Rotary Ride on Saturday, April 21, 2012.

One of the little things we do is make homemade pies for the Pathway Home veterans for Thanksgiving. Yesterday the Rotary pie delivering crew requested the recipe for the pie I brought - so here it is. I hope the pie made the trip safely all the way from Napa to Yountville. There were some hungry looking fellows driving the truck.

I used the recipe published by David Lebovitz on his blog. I generally followed the recipe, as David recommends that practice when first making a recipe. This kind of pie - containing pecans, chocolate and bourbon - is one that I have known for years as a "Kentucky Derby Pie". There is a similar trademarked name. A lovely recipe for a similar pie can be found in "The South, the Beautiful Cookbook" - which uses ground pecans in the crust as well as unsweetened chocolate and dark corn syrup in the filling. Since I have always made a pie crust with a pastry blender, I thought I would try this method for making the crust. David also recommends NOT pre-baking the crust so that the filling and crust fuse together. We have not cut the second pie I made for our Thanksgiving, so I will report on the results in the comments section.
I did not have quite enough light corn syrup, so added a bit of dark corn syrup. The dark chocolate chips I used were 60% chocolate by Ghiradelli. These are large chips.

Chocolate Pecan Pie by David Lebovitz

The crust:
1 1/4 cups (175g) flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar
4 ounces (115g) unsalted butter, chilled, and cut into 1-inch (3cm) cubes
4 tablespoons (60ml) ice water

The chocolate-pecan filling:
3 large eggs
3/4 cup (150g) packed dark brown sugar
2/3 cup (200g) light corn syrup, rice syrup or golden syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons (30g) melted butter, salted or unsalted
2 tablespoons bourbon
1 2/3 cups (190g) toasted pecans, very coarsely chopped
3/4 cup (120g) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate chips

1. To make the crust, mix together the flour, salt, and sugar in a bowl or in a stand mixer with the paddle attachment. (Or use a food processor.)
2. Add the cubed butter and mix until the butter pieces are broken up and about the size of small peas.
3. Add the ice water and mix just until the dough comes together. Form the dough into a disk, wrap in plastic, and chill for at least 30 minutes.
4. Roll the dough on a lightly floured surface into a 12-inch (30cm) round. Transfer the dough into a 9-inch ( cm) pie plate letting the dough ease into the pan, rather than pressing it in. Tuck the overhanging dough underneath the area above the rim of the pie plate, to create a double width of dough, then crimp the edges and refrigerate until ready to fill.
5. Preheat the oven to 375ºF (190ºC) and position the oven rack to the center of the oven.
6. In a large bowl, which together the eggs, brown sugar, syrup, vanilla, salt, melted butter, and bourbon.
7. Stir in the pecans and the chocolate chips then scrape the filling into the pie shell and bake for 30 to 35 minutes, or until the filling puffs up slightly but still feels slightly jiggly and moist in the center.
Let pie cool completely before slicing.

Serving: Vanilla ice cream or whipped cream is a good accompaniment to pecan pie.
Storage: Dough can be made ahead and refrigerated for up to three days, or frozen for up to two months.
The pie is best eaten the same day although will keep for up to three days, at room temperature.

To go with the pie, my dear husband John made some of his special vanilla ice cream. We may have enough left for our Thanksgiving dessert later today!

Napa Porchfest 2011 - part 1

While it is still the day after, making this yesterday's news, I wanted to reflect on Napa's first Porchfest.  Porchfest is a music festival bringing home-grown music out of parlors and garages and onto the porch.  The idea was originally spawned in Ithaca, NY. in 2007.  Louisa Hufstader brought the idea of porchfest to Napa through the wonders of Social Media.  Those are capital letters because Social Media has become such an important internet gorilla that it carries extra special weight.  Google especially would like to be a Social Media gorilla.  But that is another story.

Social Media in this case was a Facebook link to an article in the Somerville Patch about Somerville considering having a porchfest.  Thea Witsil, friend, book lover, and even bigger music lover - chimed in immediately with the comment "Let's do it here in Napa!"  The discussion blossomed - online - then we expanded it to a real face-to-face meeting with all who expressed interest invited.  Our ad hoc committee was born under the auspices of Napa County Landmarks, whose board had the unanimous good sense to see a great community event in our historic neighborhoods as a good way to carry out our mission. 


Between January 10 and July 31, 2011, Napa Porchfest was born.  (My daughter Anna Pfeifer is on the left). 

It was not an easy birth, because none of us had done anything like this.  Thea wrangled music; I wrangled venues, permits, and logistics; Louisa wrangled media, press and Social Media outreach.  When we found ourselves stranded with a web address but no web master, John L. Poole, aka "JLPorchfest" stepped in and built a database and Napa Porchfest website that could serve up information on not just the musicians, but photos of all the houses and a map combining everything.  Then he proceeded to make promotional videos, one of which serves up the houses like Anette's chocolates.

We could not foresee all the logistical problems and possibilities - which was probably a good thing during the process.  Sunday morning it felt like Yazgur's farm before the rain.  Fortunately, we did not have hundreds of thousands of concert goers, and the genial Napa crowds ranged up to the hundreds.  They took seriously our request that everyone "pack it in and pack it out", ride bicycles, and bring chairs and sunscreen. 


"Blonde on a bike"


We pulled off a free music festival on 28 private porches in residential areas featuring over 40 musical groups and over 120 musicians.  I attribute the success of the event to strong personal ties and relationships, and also to Social Media (Facebook), which brought this idea to a little "marketplace of ideas" where it could bloom.

Is Google arrogant?

Are you on the A list?

With a great media buzz fomented by selective invitations to media and online "influencers" to try out Google+, I of course was curious to try out the new applications myself.  Notice the past tense "was".  I spent time this morning instead watching the live feed of the facebook roll out of their new applications.

I was an early adopter of Google Wave, even going so far as installing an open source program providing similar applications.  Once it was finally rolled out to us commoners, I found Google Wave to be a robust and useful set of tools and was unable to share them with anyone.  A group of us collaborated on a project using Google Wave, but the other members of the group had to install the program and learn to navigate.  Other than that one project, which happened to be the City of Napa application for the Google Fiber for Communities grant - I have had no use for Wave.  I was waving to myself. 

Google Buzz, on the other hand turned out to be a disaster of a completely different sort.  I finally rationalized that it would be safe enough to upload all my contacts to gmail in order to more easily format them for use in "Vertical Response" for political email.  This was several thousand contacts.  What could go wrong? 

It seemed like a few days later (though I don't recall how many), Google Buzz was sprung on all gmail users and exposed all of one's contacts as "friends".  All visible to everyone on the list. As a careful facebook user, I kept my friend list to myself during the last election to prevent political rivals from "poaching" or mining the list for their own purposes.  Imagine my shock at seeing my political email contacts exposed in one click of the switch.  Of course this flaw was quickly noted by other users, and a work around, then patch deployed.  Nevertheless, I have not used Buzz ever.

This brings us to the unfortunate current circumstance where Google is rolling out a new product to go one or two better than facebook, but more slowly and more inefficiently.  By the time Google is ready to let the common folk past the velvet ropes, there may be few commoners remaining.  The Google+ group page has many threads and comments by frustrated geeks who cannot add their friends to their circles.  Oops.  Google did not seem to notice that Google+ is supposed to be a social application.  What good is it if your friends are not there?

Image via CrunchBaseAll us commoners will be video chatting on facebook - and not have to log into Skype to do so.  750 million other people + myself are on facebook's "A" list.  No wrist band, no bouncer. 

I like that.