Valley "Chinese", Valley Urgicare, Alchemy and Medea

As you can tell by the heading, this is an eclectic mix of subjects! 

David and Andy's Front Porch

David and Andy's Healdsburg

First, we finished a fine visit with David in Healdsburg  on Wednesday.  He and Ben purchased a large halibut steak and brussels sprouts for our final dinner there.  Of course, John had to know recipes for this: He did.   Halibut grilled ten minutes to the inch, and brussels sprouts with ginger, garlic and Worcestershire sauce.   Lobster ravioli as the starter.  (The lobsters, David said, were freshly caught while they were vacationing in the Russian River.  Crafty Californians always know how to get the best seafood!)

Calistoga Cappuccino

Thursday, we drove from Healdsburg on back roads (very nice back roads at 55 mph) to I-5 and then up to Ashland.  David had never done most of the back roads.  Ben and John had never done any of them.  It was a gorgeous day pushing our Hyundai Elantra first through miles and miles of vineyards and fancy wineries, then over the mountains covered with golden grasses and live oaks.  We stopped for a fine cappuccino in Calistoga at  a a café mobbed with bicyclists riding the roads in the 95F-34C bright sunny weather.  We passed through the area around Middletown where the oaks and grasses had been burnt to a crisp.  We remarked about the difficulties fire-fighters had getting to the blazes.

Then to I-5:  The West coast's main north south truck route, flat as a pancake scenery, mountains in the distance.  David who is from North Dakota and grew up on a farm was fascinated.  "Oh, I moved hay like that, we had silos like those where the cows used to drink the fermented juices and get drunk, falling down in the grass,'" adding that he had had several major and expensive tractor mishandlings while doing this farm hand work on his folks' farm. He said he was banned from the tractors henceforth.

John had a hankering for Chinese food, particularly noodles.  Is this possible in the very sparse and rural parts of Northern California.   We found out!  Off I-5 at  Willows, a pre-eminent example of a rural farm community in California--a welders shop, hardware stores, farm machinery stores, a rail line, corn silos and a smattering of bars and food stops.  One could never call them restaurants.

Fu Hing Restaurant Willows CA

And lo and behold on the main street was a Chinese restaurant.  The Fu Hing Chinese and Japanese.  We stopped, and entered.  Many combination plates, many dishes and even some pot stickers on the menu.  Ben had chicken with broccoli and rice, David had Mongolian beef with broccoli and rice.  We ordered six pot stockers (not bad--even came with hot sauce), and John splurged on a combination plate of chow mien, egg foo yung and sweet and sour chicken.  It can be said that Ben and David's meals were somewhat chinese-y, and John's noodles were very nice--and fit the bill--(which was enormously low).  However his egg foo yung, supposedly an Americanized version of an Chinese egg dish came out as a corn pancake, and his sweet and sour chicken, which is of little interest to begin with, came out as chicken Mc-Nuggets.   We couldn't complain because the bill was very tiny and the service very very good.   The owner's wife even queried John where we live and when told we were visiting from DC and had wanted Chinese food encouraged us to come back.   This was a pleasant, quite nice, actually, slice of life.

We arrived in Ashland late afternoon and enjoyed a wonderful dinner with our hosts here, Jane and Peter, David's husband Andy who flew in from St Paul, Minnesota, and Dick and CB whom we met in Burgundy several years ago.  Lovely meal where Ben had scallops and a soup--strawberry and black bean gazpacho.  John had a Dungeness and seaweed salad as a starter and then foie gras as his main.   Alchemy is listed highly by Wine Spectator and several other foodie publications.   The wine certainly added: Upper Five Rogue Valley sauvignon blanc for the second courses and a pinot gris for the first.  Since we had not eaten large firsts or seconds, we splurged and had a group of desserts.  Lovely evening.

John had trouble sleeping since his massage and acupuncture appeared to have worn off somewhat. This morning he and Ben talked about medical care.  We ended up at the Valley Immediate Care Center a bit out of town.  There Matthew Smith, a Physician's Assistant, had John discussing his sciatica and then within 15 minutes had him injected with cortisone and given him a prescription for oxycodone and if needed some tramadol to get him back to DC.  Very professional, very complete, and very good.  Five star treatment.  Not busy on a Thursday morning.  

This afternoon we thoroughly enjoyed "Mojada:  A Medea in Los Angeles."  It was written by Luis Alfaro as a contemporary variant of the Greek classic Medea dealing with Mexican immigrants to LA.  It is powerful, spiritual, lyrical and superbly acted. It clearly resonates with today's  immigration debates (if you can call them that).