LA Lei-Out (Part I)

It’s about time to catch people up on my post-Christmas break adventures; in January I took off to Los Angeles’ Lei-out beach tournament.  LA is great with palm trees wherever you look, and even in the winter it’s always partly sunny with highs of 20 degrees.   It was actually unseasonably chilly for California, but I managed to escape one of Vancouver’s rare snowstorms. 

I’ll save most of the touristy stuff for my next post, but here is a bit more about the people and the ultimate itself.  I picked up with a Victoria team (Notorious PIG) who were fabulously well-organized.  They rented a condo right on Venice Beach with its own lime trees in the backyard (perfect for adding to our Coronas :).     This was the view a few steps from the front gate:

 

Enjoying one of said Coronas with Meg at the house.

Friday night half the team had arrived and we went out for authentic Mexican at Lula’s which had kind of a creepy “Day of the Dead” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Dead) theme going on with skeletons everywhere and margaritas that will knock your socks off.

Holy hot tamales batman.  It also looks like stripes are all the rage for women’s wear this year.

Restaurant mural:  

A view of the Santa Monica fields where all the magic happens:

Saturday and Sunday games were fun.  We were off to a slow start though since 4 people (!!) missed their flight.  Not naming any names, two managed to make it on time  anyway (missing their  flight due to Vancouver public transit confusion) and two mistook the arrival time for the departure time and missed our first two games...   

We had lots of close games, most not going in our favour in the end, but it was still fun to have so many good match-ups.   Credits to Luke, Meg, Anita, and maybe others for these photos: Max skying an opponent, Karen with the throw, Loach with a great layout, team strategy meeting and team pic.

 

The tournament was pretty laid-back with time for mini-games at the end of each match.  One team had us play Duck-Duck-Booze (a variant on Duck-Duck-Goose where the winner drinks; Duck-Duck-Juice for the under-21s ;).  Chalk this one up to another little-known fact about Americans; they play Duck-Duck-Goose a little differently where they run in the same direction whereas we Canucks run in opposite directions around the circle.  Strange.

Duck-Duck-Juice:

One of my favourite plays from one opposing team was “Scarface” in which the woman with the disc faked “shooting” the disc at each teammate who in turned fell dead to the ground except for one guy who went long.  It was awesome and worked like a charm as we all stared at the people falling around us and just stood bewildered as the one guy went deep and scored on us! (sorry no photo)

A highlight of the weekend for me was watching the final between Swaroon 5 and Strawberry Love which went to universe point.   I was metres from Beau Kitteredge, an ultimate celebrity ever since he literally jumped over a guy in one game.    Here he is making a crazy layout to catch a bad hammer while dragging his feet inbounds (from http://sideline-photography.smugmug.com)

 

 

And now a couple of sweet photos from semi-professionals I got off the net of awesome layouts.  (creds: http://sideline-photography.smugmug.com and http://pandippo.blogspot.com/2012/01/lei-out-2012.html )

 

 

Waiting for some late-comers to show up on the Friday night, we decided to practice layouts on their bed:

 

 

 Any big ultimate tournament has a rockin’ party to go along with it, but sadly the party got shut down before midnight due to overcrowding.  Police and firefighters showed up, but not the kind from the YMCA music video.  Here is a shot just before we all had to leave:

We still had a good time rejoining as a group back at the condo.  Here is a lovely picture of Lindsay and Lee, and a nice candid shot of the group:

  

It wouldn’t be a proper ultimate post without a re-cap of the best team names/costumes of the tournament...

• Rockatpus Prime (our only loss day 1)
• Fire-breathing rubber duckies 
•  Pants Off Dance Off
• Sand people (with Star Wars musical instruments kazoo/bagpipe marching along the sand)
• “The Monkeys [are taking over the world starting with Beach]”
•  Mud Boating Rednecks
• Awesome Sauce

Mushroom Picking, Sunshine Coast

Just a few pictures from a mushroom-picking outing on the Sunshine Coast in November for this post.   For those not familiar with West Coast geography, the Sunshine Coast is a ~90 km stretch of coast on mainland BC which can only be reached by ferry/float plane since no roads connecting it to the rest of the province have been built because of its steep, rugged terrain.  Its remoteness makes it perfect for finding areas which aren’t already picked over.  Armed with a dull kitchen knife to cut the shrooms off at the stem and a few canvas bags, off into the woods we went.

To be honest I was a little cautious about going mushroom picking since I have a strong sense of self-preservation.   But with the help of a few friends I quickly learned how to identify a few edible species (chanterelle, winter chanterelle, lactaria deliciosa) and to ignore the rest.  

Witches’ butter (actually tremella mesenterica, but also known as yellow brain, golden jelly fungus and the yellow trembler).  Edible but somewhat bland and flavourless.  Expert-picker Deb likes to use it to cleanse her palate in case she has just tasted something bad.  She’s pretty adventurous, tasting (but not swallowing!) some mushrooms she’s not sure about in order to gauge them.

 Inedible but aptly-named coral mushroom

What we were really after though was the prized pine mushroom or matsutake which was in season.  They have a distinctive flavour, texture and especially smell; scratching the stem releases a rich, spicy-cinnamon aroma.  The Japanese in particular go nuts for matsutake and pay up to $2000 per kilo for the stuff.

The challenge is that matsutake are hard to find since they grow underground.  It’s a little bit like looking for buried treasure, which is a pretty rare experience as an adult having outgrown birthday-party scavenger hunts a while ago.   Your eyes scan the forest floor for a flash of white which unfortunately normally turns out to be (a) snow (it was November…) or (b) a small inedible white mushroom. 

Deb with a huge grin on her face after a big matsutake find.

I’m not sure if it was beginner’s luck, but I managed to find at least twelve pine mushrooms.  I had to give most of them away since they don’t last very long, but roasted in the oven with butter, garlic, shallots and chopped up bacon (I guess that makes anything taste good), they were simply divine!

The exciting moment of unearthing a pine mushroom.

My spoils of winter chanterelles, cleaning them up at home:

The perfect way to end a day of mushroom picking – sharing wine, toasted baguette, and fresh pan-fried mushrooms with friends.