Traveling with Karen

Happy Birthday Mustards!

A pioneer restaurateur in the Napa Valley, Cindy Pawlcyn is world-famous for her first restaurant, Mustards Grill, which opened 25 years ago near Yountville. She recently celebrated by throwing a party in her vast organic gardens for 1,200 of her closest friends, employees and supporters, plying them with such long-time favorites as her hanger steak, killer onion rings with housemade tomato-apple ketchup, BBQ babyback ribs, pulled pork, crab gazpacho, fresh oysters--and some of the best wines on the planet. Among other fab regulars on the menu at the restaurant are super-crispy calamari with curried slaw, sweet corn tamales with wild mushrooms and tomatillo-avocado salsa, and myriad delectibles from the wood-fired grill and oven: chipotle-rubbed quail, Mongolian pork chops––it goes on––potato gnocchi, lemon-garlic chicken . . . .   
     Beginning her career at The Pump Room in Chicago, and now a James Beard Award-winning cookbook author, Pawlcyn was the opening chef at Meadowwood, and continued to expand her domain by taking a major hand in creating the Fog City Diner, Bix and Bistro Roti in San Francisco; Tra Vigne in St. Helena, and the Buckeye Roadhouse in Marin County. Mustards lovers are flocking in droves to her hot new eateries, Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen and Go Fish in St. Helena.   
     Iconic Wine Country cuisine and great grill cookery were born here at Mustard's--long live the queen!

Hiking in San Diego County

Unlike the several other creek valleys that run to the sea out of the coastal mountains in San Diego County, Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve is a rare patch of semi-wilderness where a year-round artesian spring has for about 6,000 years or so provided a ribbon of life. Native Americans were the first inhabitants--acorn-grinders, they huddled near the dense forest of California live oaks, trading with coastal and inland tribes. The vast canyon became the first Mexican land grant in the early 1800s and the site of one of the first adobes built in Alta California. Later in the century the first intercontinental mail route ran through, joining the western territories with the midwest and the east, and was followed by the Butterfield Stage coaches.
    Today, miles of idyllic hiking and mountain biking trails wind along the scrub-covered hillsides and across the canyon floor, meeting, as bobcats, coyotes, deer and Southern Californians have always done, at the bubbling stream of fresh water cascading downhill between a cacophony of giant boulders.
    The canyon is easily accessible, just east of Highway 5.