Mercury, chaat, and sushi

Sounds like dangerous eating but it's just another of my mixed-bag posts.

(I wrote most of this Friday though Blogger has dated it Saturday morning when I posted it.)

Mercury

This morning, on Alex and Sigrid's recommendation, I hiked the Almaden Quicksilver County Park in Santa Clara County just south of San Jose. I wanted a workout and the route I took was very obliging: up the Mine Hill and April Trails to Bull Run for 1,200 vertical feet over 3.2 miles with only one brief stretch of level or downhill walking. Then a level mile on the Castillero Trail along the ridge to the English Camp and a steep 1.6-mile descent down the English Camp Road and Deep Gulch Trail to the Hacienda entrance where I'd begun. The whole thing took about 3 1/2 hours with lots of stops to look, take photos, and (truth be told) catch my breath. And I'd walked only a small fraction of the park's 33 miles of trails.

The park is the site of a mercury mine that operated from 1845 to 1976. My route followed (in reverse) most of a route that a local Boy Scout troop researched, mapped, and marked to highlight some of the mining sites (and a CCC camp from the Depression) that the county is working to preserve, and the natural beauty of the area. Just to give you a taste, here are three of the photos I took: the trestle at the April Tunnel (what miners called a horizontal entrance to the mine), the entrance to the San Cristóbal Tunnel, and a view from the ridge along the top of Mine Hill. I'll post the rest of them on a photo website after I get home and link to them from this blog.

The weird green color of the rocks behind the trestle was in evidence in many other areas of the park - I wish I'd photographed more of them. I guessed that it might be a sign of mercury ore [update 7/24/2018: probably California serpentine], but what I found on the Web was images of cinnabar, a red stone. I also learned that Almadén, Spain, is a famous mercury mining area going back to the Stone Age - what the miners apparently had in mind when they named their town New Almaden. The town is still there, just before you reach the park entrance.

If you like the outdoors and are ever in the Bay area, I urge you to give the Almaden Quicksilver County Park a try - it's beautiful and it's free. At the trailhead I found a good supply of both the historic trail map and the trail map for the entire park.

Chaat and sushi

Last night Alex and Sigrid treated me to chaat at Chaat House in Sunnyvale (there's apparently a sister restaurant down the road with a slightly different URL). It's a modest place in a strip mall with Bollywood flicks running nonstop on screens in every room, but the food is scrumptious and comes to your table amazingly fast. It helps to have a culinary guide on your first visit since their menu isn't annotated, and my hosts did the job admirably. My favorite was pani poori, hollow fried dough balls that you fill with a veggie mixture, water, and syrup and pop into your mouth whole.

For our dinner tonight my friend Lakenda found Kokoro Sushi, a highly rated restaurant in Pleasanton on the East Bay. The link is to their Yelp page - they seem not to have a website. The sushi was delicious but strange to my taste - more ingredients in each roll, everything drizzled with a decorative sauce, and some of the rolls and nigiri sushi baked after they were put together. I prefer plainer food, but that's just my personal taste - the sushi were really lovely to look at and delightful to eat..

One fun moment among many this evening: my favorite "dessert" of masago (smelt roe) with a quail egg on top arrived gorgeously presented with each egg still in its tiny speckled shell, something I'd never seen before. I gingerly lifted the shell and crunched the sushi blissfully. Then I noticed that the chef was watching me a bit anxiously; I let him know how happy I was with the masago and we exchanged big grins. (Photo shot with my phone - pardon the poor quality.)