BAM! (We heart Nugget) + Ben's quote of the day

Ben's quote of the day: "This is incredible. We win, muthafuckas!"

And so nothing much to report in the past couple of days except a wee little bit o'laundry last night (what a colossal waste of time! I could have been knitting the new sweater I just started. The one I've been wearing for 11 days is about to hitchhike back to Seattle alone) in Sonora, CA, where we just barely escaped a big, fat, fake-ass mining town experience by the skin of our teeth. I have recently--that is to say in the past 24 hours, give or take--discovered that Ben has an intense aversion to 1800s mining town replicas. No photos were taken. Billy was not impressed, either.

The Judge has decreed that a Best Western is at least honest about what it is, and so that is where we stayed, instead of in some hokey, imitation gold rush saloon. The night before that was the Best Western in Woodland, CA, near the Nugget grocery store, where my admittedly limited culinary world was once again rocked. 

Thank you, Nugget, for carrying grass-fed cow milk yogurt, fresh wild-caught snapper, persimmons, shitake mushrooms, red cabbages, scallions, baby bok choy, coconut milk, curries of all varieties, and those freaky, little organic garlics, gingers, lemongrasses, etc. in toothpaste tubes. (Purists, I can feel you cringing. You have far too much time on your hands.) These refrigerated tubes of pureed ginger or crushed garlic or whatever are simply magical. Maybe not quite as magical as a pasture full of soul-healing horses, but fairly high-ranking where road cooking is concerned.

What Best Western lacks in charm, it makes up for in kitchen space. When I say "kitchen space," I mean an open counter close to a sink and an electrical outlet where we could plug in our curtain igniter hot plate and pull off a bad-ass green curry coconut soup with seafood, mushrooms, and veggies. BAM!