Mandatory for vacation: some reading material

My vacation helped me reach my goal of reading 10 new books this year. Before I took a week off in August I wanted to make sure I had some good books to read. I'll admit I'm kind of a nerd for going to the library the Saturday before my boyfriend and I headed for a few days on the Central Coast to make sure I was well prepared.

I wanted a mix of books so that if one turned out to be a dud, I'd have some others for back up. I picked a few books that looked like light reading such as one about a chef who works for a morning show and a senior citizen who turns back the clock to the age of 29 for one day. I also got a few more that seemed a little hardier, such as one about a single mom raising her daughters and a young girl growing up in the South during the 1980s.

When we were packing my boyfriend asked which books I'd be bringing with me, to which I replied that I would be bringing them all. I knew I wouldn't read them all, but I wanted to have a few options. The first night when we stayed at a hotel in Cambria that had an oceanfront view, I started reading "Bitter in the Mouth" by Monique Truong. The book was not light reading, but it was well-written and kept me interested all the way through. In the book, Linda is a lawyer who looks back on her life in a small Southern town. She loves her great uncle and her father, but she clashes with her mother and her grandmother. Linda has the strange ability - or curse - that when she hears certain words she has a strong taste of something in her mouth. The sensation seems almost science fiction, until later in the book the author has her main character discover a brain disorder called synesthesia, in which the senses get mixed up. The book has a lot of dark moments in it, but it written in a way that really brought Linda to life. I read the book all through vacation, finishing it on our last night in San Simeon.

When I got home I still had a stack of books left so I started another one that wasn't nearly as well written. "Romantically Challenged" by Beth Orsoff had some funny moments but I mostly found the main character irritating. She is a single 30-something lawyer who doesn't want to end up alone, but she nitpicks at every person with whom she goes on a date. She finds something wrong with every single guy and is whiny about it without acknowledging her own short comings.

The next book had something of the same attitude. Ellie is a senior who is turning 75, but she is unhappy about getting older even though she still has her own apartment, all her capacities, her best friend lives upstairs and her grandaughter visits often. Ellie wishes to be young again on her birthday - and she wakes up the next morning to find herself 29 again. Written by Adena Halpern, the secondary characters are not very well developed. The writing is rough and the dialogue is awkward.

From there I moved on to "Last Bite" by Nancy Verde Barr. The book is about a chef who works on a morning show, preparing the cooking segments. It is written by a woman who worked with Julia Child so its no surprise that one of the main characters seems to be based on Child. The key character, however, is the 30-something chef whose dentist boyfriend has just broken up with her. She is unlucky in love and when a troublesome agent comes into the life of the TV chef personality, her job also comes into jeopardy. She quickly finds another love interest in an Irish chef who has opened a restaurant in New York and does a guest appearance on the show. She is skeptical about him, though, and assumes he is a player. The storyline is unbelievable, but a fun read. The only thing I didn't like about the book was that instead of developing some of the side characters, such as the prep chef's parents, they became caricatures of the typical Irish or Italian family.

The last book I read, to complete the 10, was "Juno's Daughters" by Lise Saffran. This book was back into the serious realm with its topic. It is about a single mother raising her two teenagers on a secluded island off the coast of Washington State. The central premise of the story is that two island residents put on a professional production of a Shakespeare play every summer, inviting professional actors to try out for it. The islanders get bit parts in the play and help out behind the scenes. The main character has often helped with the costumes and set pieces but she has never been in the cast. This year to appease her 17-year-old daughter she signs on to play Juno from the play "The Tempest." Her daughters have the roles of other spirits in the play. The main conflict in the book is that the oldest daughter happens to be interested in the same 40-something actor as her mother. The youngest daughter is dealing with abandonment issues as her best friend moves away, and then her sister departs for college. The book had the good skeleton of an idea - an abused mother leaves her husband to raise her two children alone and now is struggling with them becoming independent - but Saffran glosses over the impact that the early abuse had on her and the girls. More than that, her interactions with the two girls ring false.

Before I read this batch of books I'd also read "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett, which I enjoyed even though I felt the movie version released in August fell short. I also read another book I checked out of the library whose title and author elude me now. I do remember it was about a woman who lost a bunch of weight, opened a store to sell healthy home-cooked meals and whose husband left her for a much fatter woman. This was another book whose main character came across as whiny and whose secondary characters where more caricatures than realistic people.

For now, it's back to the New Yorker magazine, which I've been neglecting since July.

A sweet vacation

One of my favorite parts of taking a vacation somewhere new is being able to eat out - and since I have a sweet tooth that includes desserts. It's no surprise then that two of the stops on a recent vacation my boyfriend and I took to the Central Coast revolved around places to get sweet treats.

I had a few leads on finding places because a friend suggested that we stop in Cayucos, a small coastal town about 10 miles north of Morro Bay and another friend said Linn's in Cambria was a must try.

We stopped in Cambria first and checked out Linn's which serves a comfort-food menu that includes basic sandwiches as well as pot pies and quiche. I had a club sandwich that was typical of other places and my boyfriend had an asparagus and sun-dried tomato quiche. He thought the asparagus was the overwhelming the flavor of his meal, but he liked the flaky crust on the quiche. We didn't want to miss out on the olallieberry desserts so we took a couple items to go. We ordered an olallieberry and cream cheese muffin and an olallieberry cream puff. The muffin was surprisingly devoid of olalliberries and cream cheese, except for on the top and the bottom. The cream puff was tasty though it was quite a mess to eat when the cream and the easy-to-stain olallieberry syrup oozed out.

Cayucos is the home of the Brown Butter Cookie Company, whose owners created a delicious shortbread cookie made completely with brown sugar and brown butter. We stopped in Cayucos on the way from Cambria to Morro Bay on our second day, enjoyed a fresh cooked breakfast from a take-out window before we stopped at the cookie shop.

When we walked in, the room smelled of sugar and butter as workers were busy rolling out the round shortbread cookies. We were offered samples immediately from one of the owners, including an original sea salt brown butter cookie and a cocoa brown butter cookie. They had a sweet flavor finished off with a slight salty taste. I normally don't like shortbread cookies, but these were a lot more moist than the average cookie. We ended up buying a few to share later that day as well as a couple dozen to share with my family and our co-workers when we returned from the trip. The shop makes the brown butter cookies as well as traditional sugar, oatmeal, chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies. All cookies are for sale individually, or can be bought in a package. The Brown Butter Cookie Co. does sell their cookies online for those who want to try them, but can't make it down the coast.

After the trip to Cayucos, we continued south to Morro Bay, where we spent the early afternoon out on the water on a kayak. We shared a double kayak, and it was the first time we'd been in one for both of us. Luckily, my boyfriend had some canoe steering experience so we quickly got a handle on navigating the water. We judged the kayaking a success as we did not bump boats, we didn't tip over and we didn't get stuck in the sandy, shallow water.

After the kayaking, we enjoyed lunch at a local restaurant and walked around the shops near the bay. I checked out a few different candy stores and ice cream shops before settling on one that served SLO churned ice cream. The small serving came with two scoops so I got a scoop of black cherry that included bing cherries as well as a scoop of rocky road. I got it in a waffle cone because my boyfriend isn't a fan of ice cream, but likes the cones.

On the last night of our trip, we opted to eat close to our hotel in San Simeon. We went to a place called the San Simeon Beach Bar and Grill. There weren't many places from which to chose in San Simeon so we picked the place with a mix of seafood and other typical American fare. The appetizer of sherry sauteed mushrooms was delicious, but my boyfriends seafood platter was mediocre and my burger tasted like typical dinner fare. We decided to order dessert to share, and had a lemon creme cake which had moist cake and just a light lemon taste. It was pretty tasty.

I enjoyed the desserts on the trip, but it was nice to get home and cook a meal of fresh ingredients as well as swapping out the sweets for fruits and vegetables.

A savory dish and a dessert from new ingredients

When it comes to New Year's resolutions, I am much better at keeping them than I am about reporting back about them. So here is the first of several updates on how things have been going and a resolve to update things a little bit more frequently.

First off, I finished up resolution No. 12 to cook with five new ingredients quite before spring even got under way. But that doesn't mean I stopped trying out some new ingredients. This year I've tried to push myself to try new foods, recipes and cooking techniques though I still haven't tried any fish-related foods.

A few months ago, when it was still cold and rainy outside my boyfriend and I decided to cook up some beef ribs. But since it was not yet grilling weather, we found a recipe to use his pressure cooker. I'd never used a pressure cooker before, but I know from watching "Iron Chef" that it speeds up the process of cooking slow-cook items - and it can be a dangerous appliance if not used properly.

The new ingredient for me on this recipe was the beef ribs which I had never cooked at home. I wasn't sure what to expect from the process, but we looked over the recipe carefully and gathered all our ingredients. The first part was easy - we just had to cook the ribs with a season blend, sear them on all sides in a saute pan and them put them into the pressure cooker with some vegetables and beef broth. From there the pressure cooker would do the work - except that this recipe called for opening up the pressure cooker halfway to make sure the ribs were not sticking. The problem with opening up a pressure cooker is that you can't do it until it cools down enough to release all the steam from inside.

I was okay with skipping the step, but my boyfriend, armed with a long bread knife and a potholder as a face shield held the steam release valve open so all the steam escaped and we were able to check on the ribs. It is a step we would skip if we made the ribs again since there was no sticking going on. Once the ribs were cooked, we added in the barbecue sauce, which had a nice kick to it thanks to some cayenne pepper. We both enjoyed it and the meat turned out perfectly tender in under an hour.

More recently, I ended up trying a new ingredient on the spur of the moment. When I went grocery shopping with my mom a few weeks ago I saw key limes in a bag on the shelf. I've never noticed them at the grocery store before, but since they have made the dessert that bears their name so famous, I thought I would try to make a key lime pie at home. The recipe was simple, using just key lime juice, condensed milk and eggs. I cheated and used a store-bought graham cracker crust to save the time of making one at home. If I were to do it again, I would go the extra step and make the crust. The pie filling was perfectly creamy, tart and sweet at the same time, but the pie crust was a little dried out. The season for key limes is short so I probably won't be making another one soon. It was a major improvement over the frozen pie versions I've tried.

I'm sure there will be some more new ingredients to try before the end of the year, but at least one resolution can be crossed off the list.

Photos by MELISSA FLORES

Beef ribs are served with plenty of homemade barbecue sauce on top.

Key lime pie is served with a sweetened sour cream mixture on top.

A couple humorous reads mix in with the serious fare

I've made some progress on Resolution No. 10 by reading three books so far this year.

But I have to say that when I said I would try to read some lighter fare this year, it hasn't really worked out that well. I don't know if I just happen to pick up books that are filled with heavy issues or if that's just what most authors write about these days. It seems even when I don't pick out a book for myself - as was the case with the last novel I read - it still turns out to be a bummer.

I just finished reading "The Year of Fog," by Michelle Redmond. My mom randomly picked it up at the Gilroy library because it had a sticker on it that said "Silicon Valley Reads." I don't know if it is part of a book club offering, or if that sticker means the author is from the Bay Area, or perhaps if the sticker was just because the novel is set in San Francisco.

I kind of knew what I was getting into, though, when I read the book jacket about how the main character Abby spends a year looking for her fiance's missing daughter. A missing 6-year-old has to be a downer. The story is told from Abby's point of view as she continually goes back to the day on the beach when she looked away and her fiance's daughter disappeared. She is convinced the little girl is still alive, though as time passes others become more sure she has drowned in the rough waters off the Bay. The author mixes in a lot of facts about photography and memory - Abby is a photographer and she is obsessed with memory because she is trying to remember important details from the day that Emma disappeared. The details of all this memory and photography stuff might be enthralling to someone who knows less about it than the average person, but as I studied photography in college and worked in a psychology lab that did research on memory, all the details seemed confusing to the story. Sure, all the case studies Abby sites are real, but they don't really have anything to do with Abby's search except that they make the book twice as long as it needs to be. The characters don't seem real enough to make their despair matter.

The first book I read this year is one I got from the library as well, but for the life of me I cannot remember the name of the book or the author. It was by an Irish author, but no one well-know such as Roddy Doyle or Frank McCourt. In fact, the one thing I liked about the book was that it was set in Ireland, but that wasn't really the focus of the story. In a lot of books I've read by Irish authors, the country or city almost becomes a character in itself. This story was set outside of Dublin and the fact it was in Ireland was beside the point.

The story is about a widowed man who raises his young daughter alone. He and his wife are unhappy together, but he is saved from leaving her when she dies in a car accident. He doesn't miss her when she is gone - he's mostly just numb. The early part of the story, about him helping his daughter recover from the loss of her mother is juxtaposed against another great lose for the man - one that he seems unable to overcome. The book was well-written and the characters were mostly interesting, including the mother of his daughter's best friends from down the street who helps him grieve after both deaths with which he has to deal with. But I really disliked that in the last thirty pages of the book the author reveals something that changes the meaning of most of the book. It seemed to come out of nowhere, with little foreshadowing and there was not enough space in the last pages to make it all make sense. I don't mind a surprise ending in a thriller or mystery novel, but not in a dramatic book such as this.

In between these two novels, I read the latest from David Sedaris, "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk." The book is a departure from Sedaris' other work, which is usually essays about his adventures in life. I enjoy his pieces and love when one shows up in "The New Yorker" in between books. This latest endeavor however is fiction. Each story tells some cynical insight into humor nature through the point of view of animals. The stories are dark, some a little on the morbid side, but they work because in almost all of them I could think of at least one person that I could pin those characteristics on in real life. There is an owl who looks down upon is own family because he sees himself as so much better than them. There is a motherless bear who seeks out pity from all she meets. There is the Chipmunk from the title story who gives him to pressure from her family not to date someone different.

Now I am partway through a copy of "Bossypants," a book of essays by Tina Fey. So far, it's funny even though Fey has the same self-deprecating humor that she uses as Liz Lemon on "30 Rock." It's not really a biography, but Fey does share some bits about her life and how she ended up where she is. One of the funniest chapters so far is her recap of her honeymoon in which she and her husband took a cruise because he is afraid of flying - alone to have a fire break out on board the ship. I've always seen a lot of similarities between Liz Lemon and myself - and that might extend to Fey herself as she admits partway through the piece that she really doesn't like the cruise. The one time I went on a cruise, I felt the same way.

A resolution completed at Grill on the Alley

Over the last few weeks, I finished Resolution No. 13 without really thinking about it. Though I like to cook at home - and I do often cook on weekends with my boyfriend - there are plenty of times when we find ourselves going out to eat spur of the moment. Since I found myself wanting to share with him lots of my favorite restaurants - like My Pizza, in Morgan Hill, or the 19th Hole, in Tres Pinos, it turns out it wasn't so hard after all. But it turns out we eat out enough that there has been a good mix of old and new.

A few weeks ago, after running a few miles at the track and running some errands, my boyfriend and I decided to check out the Campbell farmers market. I was on a hunt for Jerusalem artichokes (one of the new ingredients I cooked with for Resolution No. 12.) It was close to 2 p.m. and many of the vendors were closing down for the afternoon. We used the time to check out what types of vendors were there and I actually found the Jerusalem artichokes.

We had just a light breakfast so the smells of some of the food vendors, who were selling crepes, tacos and more, made my stomach growl. Since the vendors were in the process of shutting down, we decided to grab a bite at one of the restaurants. Downtown Campbell has a lot from which to choose. We decided to try out Sonoma Chicken Coop, since I'd never eaten there before. The restaurant is set up so that guests order off a menu at a cashier, choose a table and then pick up the meals. It has the atmosphere of a sit-down restaurant, but without the waiters or waitresses.

The restaurant shares a space with the Campbell Brewery and that side of the restaurant feels a lot like a sports bar. When we arrived at the restaurant on Sunday, the brunch menu was still in effect. It was great because I was able to order a waffle with strawberries and whipped cream while my boyfriend got a pesto chicken sandwich, mixing up the breakfast and lunch flavors. The chicken sandwich was my second choice, so I got to have a few bites of his sandwich, too. The waffle was good, but the whipped cream didn't taste like real whipped cream to me. The sandwich and french fries were tasty, however. If I went back, I would go for lunch or dinner.

Another Sunday afternoon, before I had to head home for the evening, my boyfriend and I decided to grab a quick bite to eat a little Taqueria near his house. I never even paid attention to the name of the place, but I drive passed it every time I visit him in Santa Clara. It is within walking distance of his house so it required only throwing on a pair of flip flops and we were ready for dinner out. The restaurant offers the typical taqueria offerings of burritos, tacos and quesadillas, but it also has dinner plates. He was able to get two tacos - one with carne asada and one of al pastor - and I was able to get a enchilada combination plate.

We sat outside on the patio since the weather was warm and snacked on the help-yourself-chips-and-salsa bar that is in the center of the restaurant. There are only a few seats inside, but while we were there a few people were eating inside and out. The rice was tasty as were the refried beans. The corn tortillas of the enchiladas were soft and I had enough left over to take home for lunch the next day. It was a nice two-for-one meal.

From a low-budget taqueria, I finished off my resolution at an upscale restaurant in downtown San Jose. When I signed up for memberships at the Tech Museum a few months ago, one of the perks was a coupon from the Convention and Visitor's Bureau to save $10 at each of 18 downtown restaurants. The coupon expires in August, so my boyfriend and I had plans to hit as many of these restaurants as we can - although I'd be happy if we skipped Scott's Seafood since I don't eat any fish.

So when I had a free Thursday evening this week, I decided to drive up to San Jose to meet the boyfriend for dinner. I suggested Grill on the Alley since it is one of the coupon restaurants and it has great happy hour specials. Grill on the Alley is an upscale bar and steakhouse. Most of the people in the restaurant looked like well-off young professionals. But even if they weren't the happy hour specials are set at a price to let people play the part.

While regular mixed drinks - like the blue and black mojito I had - are $13, during happy hour there are a few martinis set at $6 and well drinks are $5. A handful of beers are available on tap for $5. The best thing, however, is that they have food specials that beat the bar food I've had at any restaurant. The food specials range from $3, $5 or $6 for small plates such as onion rings, spinach and artichoke dip, or loaded mac and cheese, which we chose. There are also some meat and fish offerings for $10 and burgers for $8-9. I ordered a filet medallion that was served with a roquefort sauce and mushrooms. He ordered a lamb chop with a mint sauce and mint mashed potatoes. The amount of food turned out to be just right. We split the mac and cheese, and the filet was just the right size for me. I even tried a bit of his lamb chop, a food I've never eaten before. The loaded mac and cheese came with bacon and mushrooms mixed into the creamy sauce. The top had a bread crumb and Parmesan crust that gave it the perfect crunch.

I would definitely be back at Grill on the Alley - probably for Happy Hour, since the regular dinner menu prices are upwards of $30-40 per entree. Plus the drinks are great, if I have a designated driver with me.

This probably won't be the end of my eating out at new restaurants for this year, so I'll be sure to continue with the updates.

Photos by Melissa Flores

A filet medallion is served with roquefort sauce and mushrooms.

A lamb chop is served with mint mashed potatoes.

Loaded mac and cheese has bacon and mushrooms mixed into it.

A few good shorts

The 21st annual Cinequest Film Festival is finishing up this weekend in downtown San Jose. Though the festival runs for 12 days - and I love movies - I opted just to catch two shorts programs so far this year. The festival has a variety of feature films and documentary films, as well as visits from a few celebrities, including AnnaSophia Robb and John Turturro.

One of my favorite parts of the festival is the shorts programs because it's one of the few venues to see good quality short-format films locally. This is not the stuff of YouTube videos.

Some of these shorts have budgets up to $10,000 or credits that run as long as a feature film. I sat through two shorts programs last Saturday, "Expectations," which included 11 films and "Slanted," which had five films. The pieces are as unique as the many filmgoers who filled downtown venues throughout the week. Some of the shorts were funny and light-hearted, while others tackled taboo subject matters that were difficult to watch.

The funny thing about the first shorts program being called "Expectations" is that it turns out that my expectations for the day versus my boyfriend's expectations were much different. I wanted to see the first program, which seemed like it might have more fun stuff in it and he wanted to see the darker movie in the second set. I suggested we buy tickets for both and then grab lunch in between. He said we should watch the first screening and then see if we felt up to seeing the second one.

I finally figured out why he hesitated at seeing not one, but two shorts programs, when we excited the theater after watching "Expectations." His first response was that the films were way better than he had expected. It seems he was anticipating low-budget films, with poor quality acting - sort of the stuff you might see on YouTube or in a student film festival. But he was pleasantly surprised by most of the films and I was content with them as well. He liked them enough to sit through a second batch of movies later in the day.


The person in charge of the Cinquest short films sets it up so that the movies are divided into several programs - so viewers can expect to see films that have something in common. Last year I saw films about kids growing up. The "Expectations" movies all have some sort of twist in the end that plays with what viewers' expectations are for the outcomes. "Slanted" was described as a slate of movies about people who have a skewed view of the world.

The first film for the "Expectations" set was probably exactly what my boyfriend was expecting for all the films. It was low quality and it was titled "Dry." It showed a person looking into a refrigerator at a bottle of booze. And then closing the refrigerator. It was short, probably under a minute long, with no dialogue and bad lighting.

But the great thing about a shorts program is that you get some bad films, but since you are seeing several movies chances are there will be some really good ones, too. With Cinequest, if you pick a random feature film, it's either bad or good. It's hard to know from the short descriptions in the program guide.

Of the 11 films, I liked eight of them. "Dry." was the only one I really disliked and the rest were okay. A short film can really be a challenge. It's like a short story - it shouldn't feel like a chapter in a book, but an entity that can stand on its own. It should feel complete. It needs to have enough background and characters that are well-enough developed to grab our attention in way less time than a feature film. It should make us feel something.

Some of the pieces felt a little bit like a prelude to something more or like something was missing. That was the case with "Wonder Boy," a movie about a college student who gets caught up with dealing drugs. The movie didn't have any clear closure, and the filmmakers, who talked after the screening, said they were making it with hopes of expanding it to a feature.

"Liv," a foreign film about a young girl who is a little on the wild side, also seemed a bit incomplete to me. The movie was funny, but it alluded to things that were never touched on again. For instance, the film starts with a blond-haired girl talking to her mother on the phone about how her father likes boys now and his boyfriend has moved in. In an off hand comment the boyfriend notes that the child's mother is dead. But no more is mentioned in the film and it ends on a jokingly upbeat note.

One of the pieces that felt most complete to me was "Mam," a black and white Scottish film. In it, a young teen gets his siblings up and off to school. Their mother is sick in bed. The movie had a lot of characters, but the focus remained on the teen and everything the other people did just added to explaining what he was all about. The movie has a twist at the end, which wasn't entirely unexpected, but the acting was good enough to make it one of the better pieces.

I also liked "Capture the Flag," one of two movies that featured an actor who has been seen in mainstream pieces. The movie is about a teenage girl who is going to the woods with her father and a group of friends or neighbors to play a game of capture the flag. She wants her father, played by Scott Cohen, to allow her to capture the flag this year. He has a boy from another family selected to be on the offense, and says he needs her on defense to guard the flag. The film is set in the 1960s, and what we know is that her mother is in a mental institution. She is on the cusp of adulthood - a lot of the other teens have moved on to not caring about the game. The movie captures the loss of some innocence for her.

One of the crowd favorites seemed to be a short called "The Same Old Story." It was in Spanish and starts with a guy standing on a bus, talking loudly on a phone. At first, the other bus riders seem annoyed with him, but soon enough, they are drawn into his tale of woe. His wife has left him and is at the house looking for a piece of jewelry while he has been out looking for a job - he is unemployed. He begs his wife to stay just long enough so that he can get home to see her - not for another chance, but just to see her for a few minutes. The other riders get so engrossed they stay on the bus past their stops and the driver speeds through a tunnel so the man won't lose his cell phone signal. I even found myself getting a little teary-eyed at his speech and recall of his happier times with his ex-wife. But since the name of the program was "Expectations," I should have known there was a twist. The film got me with the twist, and from the sound of the laughter in the theater, almost everyone else in the theater. I won't give away the ending for anyone who is lucky enough to see it.

As for "Slanted," some of the movies were exceptionally well made, but the movies were exceedingly hard to watch.

The first film was called "The Dive," and its about a bartender who has just gotten into med school in another state. The movie starts with the young man at a hospital, picking up a woman who has attempted suicide. It turns out to be his mother. So we know things aren't perfect with his life from the start. But things take a sudden turn when a man walks into the bar late at night to order a drink. He instantly recognizes the man, but we don't know why. The filmmakers talked about the movie after the screenings and said they wanted to make a story about people who have a hard time letting go of the past. The film slowly reveals how the young man knows the older one and why he is not able to let things go.

The movie was a downer, but not nearly as much as the second one. The movie was made by a group of filmmakers who got funding from the American Film Institute, and the film was made for under $30,000. The acting is good, but the movie's subject is gritty and in your face. "Silencio Fuerte," or "Hard Silence," follows a girl in her late teens or early 20s as she struggles to get away from an abusive mother - physical, verbal and sexual abuse. The footage is raw and graphic, and even days after seeing it, I couldn't get it out of my head. It was a well-made film, just not something I would have willingly chosen to watch. The filmmakers talked about making the film after the screening and they said they wanted to open dialogue about a subject that is not discussed.

Of the other films, one of them was a bit of a bizarre Swedish film, in which two guys roam the country side in search of a cup of coffee. It wasn't very funny and I didn't really get the point of it. The last film was called "Hollow," and it followed a couple who try to get clean from heroin before their baby is born. The actors had a Scottish or some sort of British accent, and the film felt a little bit like "Trainspotting"-Lite. It wasn't long enough to really draw out the characters the way I wanted them to.

The only film in the "Slanted" program that I liked was "Tapeworm." A teen at an all-girls school has such bad body image that she wants to eat a tapeworm so that she can lose weight. Her much skinnier, perkier best friend, however, wants the tapeworm for herself. The movie was an interesting look at how skewed a woman's perception of herself can be and also how mean girls can be to each other.

I liked enough of the films to make the day worthwhile, and I think I have a willing partner for next year's Cinequest.

Lentil soup warms a cold, winter evening

It's only March, and I've made quite a bit of progress on resolution no. 12. Of course, it is an easy one since I like cooking, and the food column I write for the Pinnacle life section gives me plenty of reasons to cook new recipes almost every week.

I am not an adventurous eater so sometimes I need a little coaxing to try something new. In fact, until a few weeks ago I am not sure I had ever eaten a lentil before. The only reason I did try lentils is because my boyfriend was nice enough to take me to my favorite Italian restaurant for dinner in downtown San Jose. Il Fornaio offers a special passport menu for a couple weeks each month and our Feb. 13 meal happened to coincide with the Puglia region of Italy. I persuaded him to order the taste of Puglia, a three-course meal that includes a small salad or soup, a small pasta dish and a full-size main course, so that I could try a baked pasta and meatball dish, but still order my old favorite standby.

For the first course, he ordered a lentil soup with farro, barley and vegetables. I didn't really have any intention of trying the soup, but since he offered to share it I thought I would give it a little taste. I am sure I've never eaten farro or lentils before, and I was pleasantly surprised that I actually liked it quite a bit. We ended up splitting the soup about evenly between us.

About a week later, when the weather turned wet and rainy, I decided it was time for a column about soup. And inspired by the meal at Il Fornaio, I decide to try my hand at making a lentil soup at home. The great thing about soups is that they usually don't take much work beyond chopping up some vegetables. And it's easy to speed them up for weeknight meals by using store-bought chicken broth as a base. My mom did most of the prep work for the soup one Thursday night before I got home from work. In fact, my main job was to bring it all to a boil, then lower it to a simmer and cover for about 30 minutes, checking on the tenderness of the lentils.

The recipe incorporated some of the same flavors I remembered from the restaurant dish, such as carrots, celery and onion. At the very end, elbow macaroni or another kind of pasta can be tossed in to add a little more hardiness to the dish. My only problem was estimating when the lentils would be done. I didn't want to overcook them, so I tossed in the macaroni about 40 minutes after the lentils had been simmering. The pasta cooked in about five minutes, but the lentils could have cooked a bit longer. Unfortunately, at that point, I risked really overcooking the pasta.

The soup was dished up, served with a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese and then drizzled with a little bit of extra virgin olive oil. Everyone liked it, and my boyfriend even drove more than an hour in stormy, rainy weather to eat some of it. I gave him most of the leftovers to take home, for his effort. The soup held up well for lunch the next day. It's definitely a soup that has made its way into the winter rotation.


Photo by MELISSA FLORES

Lentil soup is cooked with vegetables and chicken broth, with elbow macaroni added in just for the last few minutes of cooking.