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My New Favorite Dessert is Banuelos

By on February 4, 2012 in Food & Wine, News

Film Feast review by Santa Barbara View Restaurant Correspondent

Oh Banuelos, where have you been all my life? You had me at the first heavenly bite of cinnamon, honey and crunchy goodness. The super-frozen creamy vanilla ice cream, rolled in more crunchy goodness was icing on the cake, or in this case, the clincher for the best dessert in town.

Casa Blanca Restaurant & Cantina

But before I get to the conclusion, let me tell you about my journey to finding my new favorite dessert.  It all started on the loveliest patio on State Street. Perched on the corner of Gutierrez and State Street, under mature oak trees that are decorated with white party bulbs, you will find a romantic, friendly and inviting place that you will likely remark upon more than once during  your stay. I am not exaggerating, ask anyone who has enjoyed a drink or a bite to eat on the patio of the Casa Blanca Restaurant in Santa Barbara and they will tell you the same.

Opened in 2011 by the owners of some great local eateries; The Fish House, The Boathouse, and the Shellfish Company, it’s clear they know how to build a beautiful restaurant. The interior is worth a stop to see what they did.  I bet you’ll even be tempted to take a picture of the gorgeous tile work or the simply stunning Black Acacia bar. The owners didn’t cut any corners during their 6 month renovation project, adding beautiful details like hand blown glass light fixtures, imported tile, mahogany hand rails, and artistic rod iron. But alas, I didn’t eat inside. The patio is where I dined, and lucky for me I got a table near the outdoor fireplace where I could people watch and enjoy my tasty Jamaica (pronounced ha-mike-ah) margarita. This is one of many specialty tequila drinks on the menu and is made with pure agave tequila, agave nectar, fresh lemon, lime and hibiscus (Jamaica) juice. I didn’t get a taste of the Prickly Pear Margarita, but I did sample the Blood Orange Jalapeno Margarita and I might get that next time.

Chef Onofre

So, about the food. For those of you who are picky about their guacamole, you will either love it, or think it’s too expensive for what it is.  For me, it was exactly how I prefer it.  There was no raw onion that I had to pick out or extra “stuff” in it.  It was just ripe, fresh, buttery avocado with a few tomatoes and not much else.  For me, it was delicious.  And although I truly enjoyed it, the guac was not my favorite appetizer.  My favorite was the Garlic Shrimp.  This is where the seafood roots of the restaurant really shined.  This is a Mexican inspired dish, but it was clearly concocted with a French flair.  White wine, butter and garlic mingled deliciously with the perfectly cooked shrimp and red pepper.  Yes, that was my favorite.

For dinner, since there was a group of four of us, we decided to each get something different from the menu and share. I had the Paella Valenciana, which was on their special menu and recommended by our adorable and attentive server, Allyson (with a Y). With mussels, clams, shrimp and saffron rice, once again, I was treated to a seafood dish crafted with years of aquatic food experience. The Chicken Enchiladas are and were fundamental for our Mexican feast. I think they might be some of the best enchiladas in Santa Barbara, but then again, I am a sucker for enchiladas. I discussed this with a friend (who was not there that night) to get her opinion and she said she came in for the enchiladas one night and came back the next night so she could order them again! Anyway, I would encourage someone at your table to order them so you can taste and decide for yourself. The next dish we ordered was the Chile Verde. This dish was nice and spicy and the tender braised pork fell apart on your fork. I would order it again on a cold winter evening to warm my belly and enjoy with a cold beer. Last but not least we had the Especial de la Casa, and it was indeed Especial. Roasted pastilla pepper baked with Oazaca and Monterey Jack cheese and shrimp was a keeper. This was the table favorite and after our musical chairs of tasting everyone’s dish I have to say I did reach over for one more bite.

Baneulos

And this brings be back to the end. My new favorite dessert is Banuelos. It’s hard to believe that after meal like this that I had any room for dessert, but happily I did not pass it up.   One bite and you will see what I mean.

Hats off to talented chef Onofre. I will be back, and I might just start with dessert next time!

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Santa Barbara Garden Post

By on February 4, 2012 in Green & Garden, News

A WINTER MEDITATION ON PRUNING

I would like to share this article with you. Lovingly written, applies to all gardening! Linda Buzzell, co-founder of Santa Barbara Organic Garden Club, has a true communion with plant beings, and I’m hoping we, you and I, will all work on bettering our connections with them as well. Long before I started veggie gardening, less than a decade ago, I read Findhorn Garden and was impressed way back then, by the relationship the gardeners had with the land and the plants and how successful that was for them both. Bless you for your kind attention.

Mystic Rose at Rosaflora.net

A WINTER MEDITATION ON PRUNING

Linda Buzzell-Saltzman

Winter and early spring are the seasons when many gardeners, orchardists and farmers — fancying themselves surgeons — approach their trees, shrubs and roses with knives, pruning shears and saws in hand, seemingly unaware that these plants are, as the Buddhists would say, sentient beings.

Most pruning is less a conversation between two of nature’s creatures and more an act of ruthless domination under the guise of necessity.

For some reason over the last few millennia we have come to believe that plants are unable to survive, bloom and fruit properly without human intervention. And while much of the painstaking breeding and hybridizing by our ancestors has provided us with an extraordinary variety of edible plants, it may be time to question some of the time-honored Western methods of plant care.

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Cracking Down on Sidewalk Bikers and Skateboarders

By on February 3, 2012 in News

After being exposed on Santa Barbara View, it appears our local police are finally cracking down on bicyclists and skateboards who use the sidewalk.
The Palm has the story…

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A Bird’s-Eye View…

By on February 3, 2012 in News

Did you know… in 1940, the population of Santa Barbara was 34,438.

Yet another downtown Starbucks… the fourth coffee shop of it’s nature is now open on the corner of Carrillo and De La Vina. The shop isn’t expected to sell beer or wine.

Talk of the Town… the movie generating the most buzz at the SB International Film Festival is Starbuck, a story about a sperm donor who fathered 533 children. “Funny, heartwarming, made me laugh and cry,” said one Festival enthusiast. “It’s the best movie I’ve ever seen at the Festival.” Starbuck plays again tonight, 7:40 p.m. at the Metro IV.

Occupy Santa Barbara… a documentary about the leaderless local movement, with a focus on the De La Guerra arrests, screens Saturday at the Metro IV, 10:10 p.m.

Recommended reading… a new 158-page book is out on the life of George Owen Knapp.

They’ve been working on the railroad… a project to replace nearly 50,000 railroad ties throughout Santa Barbara County wraps up this week. 160 track workers and 50 traffic controllers were needed to replace the local ties for the first time in 20 years.

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Tripped up by a Net Full of Holes

By on February 2, 2012 in Cheri Rae, News

By Cheri Rae

Right about now, I’m wishing it was primary time in California—I’d like to see Republican front-runner and the likely nominee for the presidency take a walk down State Street. After Mitt Romney’s comments about his lack of concern for the poor—and his belief that they’re caught by some magical safety net—it might be a real eye-opener for him to see how torn and tattered it really is, even in America’s Riviera.

He could spend the night in some sumptuous digs in a pristine compound in Montecito, where he’d surely feel comfortable rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous living there. But that’s only part of the story around here, despite the recent Hollywood Reporter article, one of those breathless real estate features that focus on the glitterati who have purchased pricey getaways on the beach or in the hills of Santa Barbara—leaving the impression everyone who lives here is part of the one percent.

But then I’d like to see him take a morning walk on the wild side of our downtown business district and catch a strong whiff of what’s going on out on the streets The sensory assault makes a glitter bomb seem like just a sparkly interlude. Morning is prime time for the down-and-out to congregate on State Street, after spending the night in a shelter, or simply finding shelter somewhere we can’t even imagine. That’s when they’re out in numbers, begging for bucks and depending on the kindness of strangers to supply them with food, drink and handouts for them to purchase who knows what else to get them through the day.

Those nice benches where they hang out might look good in the expansive gardens at one of the many Romney homes—the $12 million one in La Jolla, or the multi-properties on the shores of Lake Winnepesaukee, New Hampshire, complete with boathouse, stables and tennis courts. But in Santa Barbara, they’ve turned into a sort of daytime shelter, a place to be—even after they were repositioned at the tune of $50,000, less than a single day’s work for our man Mitt.

In all the Republican debates I’ve subjected myself to, not one single question has been asked, not a single word has been uttered about chronic, desperate homelessness—and communities that attempt to deal with it. Santa Barbara is obviously not the only place where it’s happening. But these out-of-touch elites appear to be completely, totally and disgustingly oblivious to the desperate circumstances of real human beings—who for whatever reasons live as beggars on the streets of the U.S.A.

Like all of us, I have none of the answers when it comes to poverty and homelessness, the local industry that supports it, or the irony of glamorous walled compounds located just a mile away from homeless shelters. But I wrestle with the issue—and sure despair when someone who holds Presidential aspirations seems oblivious to a primary fact of life around here. That mythical safety net has been ripped and torn beyond repair—and as we try to cope with it, the social fabric for the rest of us is getting pretty threadbare, too.

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Beware False Choice Framing

By on February 2, 2012 in News

Weekly Column by Sharon Byrne

Political debates are often born as emerging social issues framed as an either / or situation with mutually exclusive outcomes. That automatically polarizes the issue into black  / white extremes. When positions become polarized, it sets up a false choice. These are mental traps. Avoid them.

A few examples of false choice framing that come to mind:

  • Either we help the homeless, or we’re cruel.
  • Either the gang injunction, or programs to help at-risk youth.
  • Either bulb-outs save lives, or they’re annoying impediments that artificially constrain cars.
  • Either allow marijuana dispensaries, or a cancer patient suffers.

Those false choice arguments, once entrenched, then perpetuate poor logic downstream. In our example above on homelessness, that initial framing expands to include:
1. Help is clearly always the right answer.
2. More help must then be better. If helping isn’t working, then we must simply escalate our efforts.

The unspoken thought here is that we can’t bear to be thought of as cruel, so we must cleave to helping. No other choice is possible.

The pitfall of false choice framing is it blinds us to information that could illuminate the real problem, and lead to a solution. When information emerges that doesn’t fit our frame, however, our first psychological move is to edit it out, pretend it isn’t there. Our second move is to reclassify it so that it falls into the opposition frame, and is thus bad.

Some have seen that our notions of help sometimes enable anti-social behaviors that we’d ideally not want to encourage. Imagine the businessman on State watching someone hand money to a panhandler, feeling good that they have done something to help a soul in need. The panhandler then trots to the nearest liquor store for a fifth, and later passes out on a bench. He awakens to another transient attempting to steal his booze, and promptly stabs the would-be thief. The cops come, and run warrants checks. Turns out the stabber has a felony warrant from another jurisdiction. People now perceive the area as unsafe, and business falls off.

First responders have long dealt with felons posing as homeless. Business owners who’ve had their windows smashed out, or experienced assaults clearly recognize that some homeless are not harmless. Neighbors might howl in despair when well-meaning individuals turn up with food for the transients that just did some drugs on the corner.

But anyone with these kinds of experiences who then tries to present this information in a public setting will be stunned to hear the equivalent of a Greek Chorus erupt, damning them as heartless meanies who don’t understand the needs of the helpless individuals lodged in a semi-permanent state of despair, further crippled by mental health and substance abuse issues. “They need our help! We’re helping them! It’s going to work someday! You’re just being cruel!”

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Feasting Through the Film Festival: Bistro 1111

By on February 1, 2012 in Food & Wine, News

The Film Feast… according to the organizers: “Santa Barbara’s cast of culinary characters presents Film Feast three-course tasting menus offered Jan. 26 – Feb. 5, 2012.“ And 50 of Santa Barbara’s restaurants, bars and hotels are participating.

A random stop for locals along the Film Feast trail is Bistro 1111, located at the southern end of the Hyatt Santa Barbara. The restaurant faces out towards East Beach.

Bistro 1111 has a brand new approach… a new staff, a very friendly new chef named Martin (pictured left), and a whole new menu. For starters, the Film Feast menu offers the choice of crab cakes, with a delicious Chipolte Aioli sauce, or Ceasar Salad. The entree choices are organic roasted chicken, local sea bass, and New York steak topped by a mouthwatering gorgonzola butter.

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Martin Scorsese on Hugo with its use of 3D

By on January 31, 2012 in News

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Fitting In Fast Food

By on January 31, 2012 in Loretta Redd, News

Weekly Column by Loretta Redd, PhD

McDonalds owes a debt of gratitude to Santa Barbara for its gift of the late Herb Peterson, who, in the 1960′s with Don Greadel, invented the Egg McMuffin. Though it took until 1972 for this mighty little breakfast orb and renowned hangover cure to become nationally distributed, it remains as much a hit today as it did then.

Of course, McDonald’s didn’t have 27 million daily U.S. customers then (growing by one million per year) and fast food hadn’t become a major component of America’s blubbery big-bottoms tilting the scales of healthcare cost and limiting longevity.

I recently read that the city of Loma Linda is attempting to prevent ‘Mickey D’ from coming to its health-oriented town. Seems that about half of the 22,000 residents are Seventh Day Adventists, who approach their bodies with serious intent: no alcohol, no tobacco, no caffeine, and usually vegetarian.

The residents of Loma Linda have been designated by National Geographic as one of four cities in the world where residents life expectancies reach into their 80′s, 90′s and 100′s. (Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya, Costa Rica and Sardinia, Italy are the others.)

Clearly, these folks are evidence that driving through the golden arches can also fast track you toward the pearly gates. But we live in a society with freedom of choice, and reward developers and their seemingly insatiable appetite for new fast food locations.

Even in towns where the population really doesn’t want them.

Loma Linda does in fact have a del Taco and Carl’s, Jr. but the Happy Meal location is a little too close to “site of the rolling hills that Adventists prophet Ellen G. White envisioned as a haven for the church.”

City Council in between a rock and a Big Mac on this one. The Loma Linda University Medical Center has joined with the Adventists in pleading to restrict the placement, and every council member knows there is another election right around the corner.

So, should Uncle Sam replace Betty Crocker in the kitchen? Is it the role of government- local, state or federal- to control what we eat? I can’t imagine it is a just matter of “education,” because if anyone still believes you can have a healthy body surviving on brown and white fried food seven days a week, they haven’t been to the doctor in a while. And don’t tell me it’s cheap, because in the long run, poor health is anything but.

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Santa Barbara Film Festival Open

By on January 30, 2012 in News

Few things at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival generate as much chatter as the introduction video, which shows before every movie. Art Critics… your thoughts?

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Six Years Ago… the Goleta Post Office Massacre

By on January 30, 2012 in News

January 30th is another infamous day in the history of Santa Barbara County. Today marks the six-year anniversary of the Goleta post office massacre.

After killing her next-door neighbor with a shot to the head, Jennifer San Marco went on to open fire inside the U.S. Postal Service building in Goleta, killing seven employees before taking her own life. The shootings comprised the worst mass murder by a woman in the history of the United States.

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Santa Barbara County Courthouse Sunken Gardens Sunset

By on January 30, 2012 in News, SB Photos

Santa Barbara Photo of the Week by Bill Heller.

Looking back it’s been a while since I posted a panorama. And what better place for a beautiful view in every direction than the Santa Barbara Courthouse Sunken Gardens? Yet another beautiful oasis in the middle of the city perfect for a relaxing walk, even if you only have a lunch hour to get away.

Controls from left to right:
+ Zoom in;
- Zoom out;
change the way the view moves when you drag;
toggle full screen

-Bill Heller

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My Night in Italy

By on January 29, 2012 in Food & Wine, News

Film Feast review by Santa Barbara View Restaurant Correspondent

Let’s face it, Santa Barbara has lots of restaurants.  There are literally hundreds to choose from.  And if you are anything like me, you have a favorite dish at a restaurant and you just order the same thing.  For example, if you are at Brophy’s you get the clam chowder, if you find yourself at Carlitos, you get the fajitas, if you are at Harry’s you always get the Blue Moon Martini (Grey Goose vodka with blue cheese olives).  And if you happen to find yourself at Ca’Dario, there is one favorite that is nearly impossible to pass up, the Ravioli al Burra e Salvia (Brown Butter Sage Ravioli).  Personally, I have ordered this menu item as an appetizer, an entree and a dessert!  But oh Ca’Dario, how you surprised me.  On Friday night, my favorite dish was actually out shined by a heavenly special on the “Film Feast” menu!

Say what you will about the SB International Film Festival, an unexpected benefit of the festival that you may love or hate, has started a new tradition in culinary bliss.   The Film Feast.  According to the organizers: “Santa Barbara’s cast of culinary characters presents Film Feast three-course tasting menus offered Jan. 26 – Feb. 5, 2012.“ And 50 of Santa Barbara’s restaurants, bars and hotels are participating.

As a local, I already know that Ca’Dario has good food.  But I have to say, the Ca’Dario Film Feast Menu is worth every penny.  If you have never been to Ca’Dario or have not been in a while, you owe it to yourself to take a ‘staycation’ to Italy on Victoria Street.  The quaint European atmosphere is genuine with traditional décor; white tablecloths, hardwood floors, smell of roasting garlic and the sweet sound of clicking glasses and plates and a steady hum of friends and lovers in lively conversation.  The staff is friendly and very loyal, our server has been with the restaurant for 15 years.  And you won’t find an ounce of pretense.

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Never Forget: the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill

By on January 29, 2012 in News, SB History

On the afternoon of January 29, 1969, an environmental nightmare began in Santa Barbara. A Union Oil Co. platform stationed six miles off the coast of Summerland suffered a blowout. The platform ruptured because of inadequate protective casing.

For eleven days, oil workers struggled to cap the rupture. During that time, 200,000 gallons of crude oil bubbled to the surface and was spread into a 800 square mile slick by winds and swells. Incoming tides brought the thick tar to beaches from Rincon Point to Goleta, marring 35 miles of coastline.
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Beaches with off-shore kelp forests were spared the worst as kelp fronds kept most of the tar from coming ashore. The slick also moved south, tarring Anacapa Island’s Frenchy’s Cove and beaches on Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa and San Miguel Islands.

Animals that depended on the sea were hard hit. Incoming tides brought the corpses of dead seals and dolphins. Oil had clogged the blowholes of the dolphins, causing massive lung hemorrhages. Animals that ingested the oil were poisoned.

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Santa Barbara Garden Post

By on January 28, 2012 in Green & Garden, News

This is your last chance to plant more rounds of winter veggies you love the most, and the littles that grow year round. Peas are especially heat sensitive, but we Coastie pea lovers can get one more round! At this time be sure they are mildew resistant varieties! But it’s really time to think in terms of those summer treats you love too! Space is an issue now unless you have fields! Those of us in 10’ X 20’ Community Garden plots need to reserve space and prepare those soils. I plant some of the smaller border plants, like lettuces, where they will be on the sunny side, then add the bigger plants that need more heat behind them in March.

Plant LETTUCE, beets, brocs, cabbages, cauliflower, celery, chard, kale, kohlrabi, potatoes, radish, spinach, turnips. Asparagus and artichoke bare-root. Or put in asparagus from seed in March.

Clean things up. Prune your trees, remove dead wood in your herbs. Divide clumps of Society garlic. On ground that needs more humus, lay down some bagged steer or well aged horse manure, let the rains wash the nutrients down, in about 2 months dig it in.

Continue with your harvesting, sidedress your producing plants, do your snail prevention. After rains, foliar apply another batch of aspirin – stimulates growth, boost the immune system, and baking soda and powdered milk to boost their immune system and act as a germicides. Don’t forget to add a dash of liquid soap to make the mix stick! Hold off on watering for a few days to let the potion do its job. Your plants will thrive!

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