Holy Tomato

This morning we awoke with a shared vision. Just an old habit resurfacing.
"Let's go out to coffee."
Which was a pretty uneventful prospect, in St. John's. It was a matter of strapping on the baby, grabbing Travel Scrabble and a dictionary, and hiking up to either Anna Banana's or Ladybug Cafe, depending on how far we felt like walking and whether Jinx followed us or not (Anna Banana's wins the prize for Most Outdoor Pet Dishes, hands down). Sometimes, for a special treat, we'd get in the ... car ... and, um, drive... to the Little Red Bike Cafe. We actually rode our bikes there once, but I had this person living in my belly who got upset about knees banging on the wall. Kenneth refused to park the car anywhere near the cafe, being a diehard fan of biking and being also completely mortified to be seen driving there.

Here, the coffee outing is a completely different story. The only walking distance coffee is at the Starbucks inside of Vons, which just doesn't offer that relaxed coffee house atmosphere we crave. So we do the next best thing. Wait. The next best thing might be to stay home and brew up a pot of carbon-print free joe, but that also doesn't offer that relaxed coffee house atmosphere. Not relaxed in the slightest. :) So we Google and we Mapquest and we set off for the nearest hit returned after typing FairTrade ShadeGrown FreeRange HormoneFree WildCaught Etcetera.
The Conservatory for Coffee and Tea looked the most promising, its website decorated with the latte art we so took for granted in Stumptown.

I'd never been to Culver City before. Venice BLVD was closed. Some runners were having a marathon, apparently. So we jigsawed around this block and that block until, waiting at the light to cross Venice again, having mistakenly thought that we'd avoided the blockadence and would be able to turn left, Kenneth spotted a Wee Mouse as it ran under our car. Kenneth, being the guy that he is, showed some Concern for the fate of the creature. He revved and rocked the car a bit to scare the mouse out from under impending death while I squinted out the window to see if it ran. Kenneth spotted it again, this time hiding beside the wheel of a jeep behind us. Under the jeep. I stuck my head out the window and peered at the mouse several times. The Tough Guy in the Jeep stared at me. I didn't try and explain because he wouldn't have heard me. Kenneth rolled forward so that Jeep Guy might roll forward and scare off the mouse. Finally he did. The mouse tried to run in front of the back wheel and hopped back just in time not to be crushed. But then the light turned Green. Jeep Guy honked viciously at us, not knowing about the Wee Mouse or the Peril it was in, just that some lady kept staring at him out her window. We went, he went, and I don't know where the mouse went.

We passed SONY STUDIOS which is the size of a town. The Conservatory for Coffee and Tea was closed. We drove around some more and found Venice Grind and right next to it...

A FARMER'S MARKET!

Where there was a bucket of free gerbera daisies for the kids. It had a sign reading "Kids Pick One Free" and Kenneth helped Edie pick a pink one. She chewed on it until it ended up behind my ear instead. She kept a little green bit of it in her mouth for a long time though, which I found later. We sampled the wares. They were all delicious. We found the Heirloom Tomato guy, who was so nice he let us sample a melon from the next stand over. It was his personal melon, not for sale! He just wanted to share! Farmer's Market people are great people. We also saw the same guy selling dragonfruit that we'd seen at the El Segundo farmer's market. We split a dragonfruit from his stand for breakfast and now I believe in aliens. It's what would happen if you took the sourness out of a kiwi, replacing it with purple sorbet but keeping the seeds, and poured it into the perfectly hollow center of a spiky pink rubber football. Or something like that. There was a little girl exiting Heirloom Tomato Heaven with her mother, and she'd pulled a big yellow Pineapple tomato out of the bag and her mom had to stop her from eating it right there. In this land of processed kid foods that aren't really foods but brightly wrapped bits of science experiments aggressively marketed until some of our nation's young will only eat food from a box or can, and only if it's a certain kind of box or can, it is so refreshing to witness a kid trying to sneak a tomato before dinner.

I made bruschetta from my two little heirlooms...but next time I'm going to sneak one before we get home.