Lunching at Steinbeck's Childhood Home with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Lunching at Steinbeck’s Home with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

When I moved to Monterey County (California), one of the first things I did was try reading all of John Steinbeck’s novels that I could get ahold of at the library. 

My favorite John Steinbeck novel remains East of Eden, which is set in Salinas (California), a little bit east of where I live now in Marina, California.

I was happy to learn that his childhood home in Salinas was a restaurant.

I called the editor at the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation:  200,000) and asked if I could do a story on lunch at Steinbeck’s birthplace in Salinas.

She thought that would be grand, especially for getting visuals for the article.  I called and made reservations for lunch.  (Florence was at school, so I lunched alone.  I worked on some projects while I was waiting for my meal.  I always have large post-it notes with or a small notebook with me for this purpose.)

The article I wrote follows:

The Steinbeck House in Salinas offers homey meals and a chance to tour the author’s birthplace.

On a visit last week to the Steinbeck House Restaurant in Salinas, I snuck a peek into the room where John Steinbeck was born.

The 19th-century manor immediately made me think of childhood visits to my great-aunt’s Victorian house with its dark, wood furniture, lace curtains in floor-to-ceiling, and brown flower print tablecloths reaching to the floor.

Thanks to the labors of the Valley Guild volunteers for the past thirty years, lunch in this landmark establishment provides the seasonal offerings of the Salinas Valley at a reasonable price.  Meals change on a weekly basis.

Lunch with rolls, a starter entrée, and beverage are reasonably priced.  For those interested in lighter fare, the Steinbeck House offers a soup and salad special.  There are desserts and wine by the glass.

The chef plans out all the meals one month in advance, so that guests can check out what is being served before making reservations.

The day that I ate at the Steinbeck House, I had a molded cranberry fruit salad, chicken cacciatore with tortellini, the house iced tea, and a slice of lemon tart.

While waiting for the starter to arrive, I helped myself to the homemade rolls that the waitress brought.

The rolls were as soft and moist as brioches without the sugary taste.  Instead, the chef had brushed the tops with a butter, garlic, and dill mixture that made them taste even better than dessert.

The slice of red, molded cranberry fruit salad that came served on a lettuce leaf was much more elegant than plain Jell-O.  Cranberries, along with thin slices of celery, chopped walnuts, and crushed pineapple went into this tart gelatin.  This starter did the job of “opening the appetite” as the French would say.

Chicken cacciatore always amuses me when I order it.  This dish is also known as “Hunters’ Chicken” as I learned while perusing the Joy of Cooking one day.  I wonder what kind of hunter would carry tomatoes, mushrooms, and chicken around to create this dish.

Apparently, the genius of an unlucky hunter has given the rest of us a dish of moist chicken sautéed in olive oil and simmered in a mixture of tomato paste, white wine, and chicken stock flavored with thyme, basil, marjoram, and mushrooms.

The Steinbeck House version of this dish is sweet tasting.  I liked the sauce with the homemade tortellini.  I sipped the delicious Steinbeck House iced tea made with lemonade, black tea, and a “mystery” ingredient.

Brown-tinted photographs of John Steinbeck’s parents, Olive Hamilton and John Ernst Steinbeck, hang on the walls in frames in gilt ovals around the photos.

A large, red bow for Christmas decorated the right side of each photo.  A Nutcracker-worthy Christmas tree stood in the room where Steinbeck was born.

They have a volunteer-run gift shop with books and other Steinbeck-related items.

End of Article

I brought Florence back to the “Nutcracker House” for a tortellini lunch with hot tea.  I showed her Steinbeck’s room and told her we would also visit the Steinbeck Center downtown, too, to see the camper that he traveled around the U.S. in for Travels with Charley.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Ruth Paget Selfie

Discussing Bogus Statistics and Science with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Discussing Bogus Statistics and Science with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

On the way home from my daughter Florence’s charter Waldorf School in Pacific Grove (California), we had a discussion about bogus science.

Florence began by telling me that one of the parents at school said that aliens caused the 9/11 terrorist attack when we went to the astronomy field trip at Pebble Beach.
I told Florence, “That is a bogus science remark.  She probably said it, because you-know-who runs a Girl Scout troop and does not invite most of the class to participate despite getting funding as a class troop.”

I continued, “Do not worry about being in the troop, we do more interesting family field trips and activities, because dad and I are better cultured and educated than the troop leader’s family.”

“Just tell alien-terrorist mom that we want to retain our culture, religion, and heritage like scout leader mom.  The rest of the class are free to do the things we do, but many of our family field trips are religious or violate dietary laws,” I said.

Florence laughed at my peacekeeping efforts for the day.  I used this discussion as a teaching moment about bogus science, the scientific method, and statistical correlation.

“Bogus science is actually kind of fun, but you have to recognize it for what it is.  Aliens are the topic of the 2000s.  When I was young, there were books out on the Nazca Lines in southern Peru that were supposed to be landing sites for alien planes,” I said.

Florence was laughing.

“But, the topic I was more interested in was Pyramid Power.  I asked my science teacher, if I could do my science project on pyramid power even though I knew this was phony, but I thought it would be a good way to show how the scientific method works,” I said.

My teacher agreed to a pyramid power experiment that I would devise.  We skipped a human subjects interview.

I made a presentation to the class about the pyramids at Giza, the architect Imhotep, and the process you need to go through to establish a theory with the scientific method.

The outline I gave at the presentation for the scientific method follows:

-Ask a question
-Do background research
-Construct a hypothesis (A simple one would be: If I do this, then this will happen:____________________)
-Test the hypothesis with an experiment
-Do test results support your hypothesis?  If so, proceed to the next step.
-Do the results not support your hypothesis? If not, analyze the results, but do not change the data to support your hypothesis.  Proceed to the next step.
-Analyze data and draw conclusions.  This step is different from seeing if data supports your hypothesis.  Notably, see if your research has further research implications.
-Communicate your results in written and spoken form.

My hypothesis, which I developed from the book named something like Pyramid Power, was that if my science and United Nations teacher sat directly under the apex of a pyramid over her head, she would become neater and more organized.

In theory, the force of the pyramid was supposed to concentrate and send a ray of power into her brain and make my teacher think better.

She had to record in a journal over a month-long period any changes in her routine that made her neater and more organized on a daily basis.  She had to take a picture of her desk on the first day of the experiment as a baseline to see if any changes were apparent at the end of the experiment.

I bought an engineering toy set with tubes and connectors, which we hoisted over her desk as a class project.

During the month of the experiment, all of us would crowd around her desk and take any chance we could to sit at her desk and say, “Buzzzz” and shake like the force was with us amidst much laughter.

At the end of thirty days, our science teacher shared her notes with us and said she had become more organized while sitting under the pyramid.

At this point, our science teacher became a scientist and not an entertainer.  She took this opportunity to tell us about correlation in statistics that we would take in college.
“The better organization could have been due to the pyramid or some other factor.  But, as all of you kids were crowding around my desk, I kept grade books and notes to other teachers put away.” 

“So, another factor caused me to be organized.  I can talk, but when you are dealing data, you have to take many factors into consideration.  Many times thinking of why something happened in dollar figures, helps evaluate an data to draw a conclusion,” she said.

After that, all of us took photos under with our arms held out buzzing to conclude my Pyramid Power project.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Marrying France and Eating Soup with Chopsticks

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Ruth Paget Selfie

Visiting the North Carolina Outer Banks by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the North Carolina Outer Banks by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

When my husband Laurent went on a business trip to Virginia, I went along with him to see some new sites in our old home.

We wanted to visit the Outer Banks in North Carolina and headed south through the Great Dismal Swamp that is located in both Virginia and North Carolina.  This place is creepy.  The road is built above the soil, which is flooded with water and surrounds tree roots.  Mosquitos like to call the Great Dismal Swamp home.

We drove across low-lying bridges above ocean water in rain to arrive on the island where Manteo is located.  They have an upscale Harris-Teeter grocery store where you can buy raw (fresh) oysters, dry white wines to go with the oysters, banana-cream pies, and chocolate covered coffee beans to munch on.

In Manteo, they also had drive-thru liquor stores all along the beachfront.  Manteo is the main town for excursions to the outlying islands, which you get to by driving over mile-long bridges that lie low over the ocean water.

We drove over more low-lying bridges in the rain.  I was becoming concerned about the rising ocean water around us, but the bridges were not flooding, so we continued onward.
Once on Roanoke Island, we drove around Dare County.  The Carolina-Algonquian people inhabited this area in the 16^th century.

The English under Sir Walter Raleigh founded Roanoke Colony in this area in 1585.  Governor White of the Roanoke County left the 120 colonists in 1587 to get supplies in England according to the website for North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

When Governor White returned in 1590, the colony had vanished.  The only thing left of the colony was a carving on a tree that said, “Croatoan.”

From Roanoke, we drove over more low-lying bridges to arrive at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.  From Kitty Hawk, we had to drive to Kill Devil Hills to see the Wright Brothers National Monument, which details aviation history.

The two brothers, who manned the “first controlled powered airplane flights” at Kill Devil Hills, were Oroville and Wilbur Wright.  The brothers were engineers from Ohio.

After we finished visiting the aviation museum, we drove home over the low-lying bridges in more pouring rain.

We drove around some of the beachfront house suburbs and drove back to Norfolk, Virginia through the Great Dismal Swamp for chicken mole as I thought of reading some Edgar Allen Poe stories in this creepy, dank, and fungus-prone world.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Ruth Paget Selfie

Eating Russian Food by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Eating Russian Food by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Before I moved to Monterey County twenty years ago, I read about the history of the area and learned that explorers had come to the area from nations as diverse as France, Spain, England, and Russia to establish whaling trading posts. 

There are still entire Russian settlements in California and Alaska in the United States.  We even have a darling Russian Orthodox Church in Seaside, California.  There is an old whaling station that you can visit outside Carmel, California in Point Lobos State Park, too.

With this historical background in mind, I immediately wanted to try the food at the Pagrovia Café in Pacific Grove, California that advertised Russian and Italian specialties when I was on my way to pick up Florence at her charter Waldorf School in PG.

I called up my editor at the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) and said, “There’s a Russian restaurant in PG.  We need to see what they eat.”

I got the assignment and off I went to write the following article:

A là Russe

As soon as I heard that the Pagrovia Café served Russian food, I took out an atlas to locate the Russian region of Pagrovia to see what influences it might have on the meals served in this new restaurant.

Luckily, before I started doing online searches to find this mysterious region, my Pagrovian friend told me that “Pagrovia” is PG-speak for Pacific Grove.

With that issue out of the way, I invited another friend to sample a Russian dinner.  When we walked into the restaurant, we liked seeing a samovar at the door.  Paintings of icons and St. Petersburg canals by the Italian-American chef lined the walls.  White linen tablecloths and fresh flowers awaited us at our table.

I suspect that co-owner Valentina Rapisarda, a native of St. Petersburg, had a hand in the decorating.  I could easily imagine the early 20^th century Russian poet Anna Akhmatova alchemizing her unrequited loves into poems in this former diner.

But it is not all about Russia at Pagrovia: the oversize menus offering a choice of Russian and Italian foods reflect both owners’ cooking styles – Russian and Italian.

While my dinner mate and I decided what to order, we dipped fresh, warm slices of Parmesan focaccia in balsamic vinegar and olive oil.  (This is a sneaky vegetarian protein combination from Italy).  Then, we ordered our Russian banquet: piroshky and beef Stroganoff for my dinner mate and borsch and barashka (lamb stew) for me.

I love the crimson color that borsch gets from beets, its main ingredient.  What I especially like about Pagrovia’s version of borsch is its savory flavor as opposed to the sweet and tangy flavor the soup usually gets from sugar and lemon juice in the versions I ate at Zukin’s Deli growing up in Detroit, Michigan.  (Zukin’s was by Friends School – my first high school in Detroit.)

My dinner mate laughed about all the vegetable additions to the borsch I ordered: carrots, cabbage, potatoes, celery, and mushrooms.  Moscovites traditionally make their borsch from beets and serve it cold as a clear broth; my dining mate told me that we were eating the Ukrainian version.

I liked the taste of the dill that decorated the top of the soup.  If I were cooking, I would chop it up and sprinkle it on top to combine the flavors.

The traditional accompaniment for borsch is beef.  The soup is based on a stock made from beef and ham bone.  I chose seafood as my accompaniment, because I can never pass up shrimp after suffering a seafood-deprived youth in the Midwest.  However, I can tell you that the borsch was so good that it made the seafood superfluous.

The piroshky my dining mate ordered was a surprise to me.  Where I grew up in Detroit (Michigan), we used to call Polish piroshki “Russian ravioli” to which our Polish friends would yell, “Polish ravioli.”  (2018 Note:  Did you catch the difference between the endings on Polish and Russian word?)

Piroshky are half-moon shaped pasta pockets filled with either cabbage or beef and onion fillings.  I was expecting my dining companion to get a pile of these with melted butter and parsley on top.

What my dining companion got was a piroshky with a college education.  Mounded up like a sculpture with a potato pancake as a base was a cannoli-like crêpe filled with chopped porcini mushrooms imported from Italy, sweet purple onions, and chopped, hard eggs held together with a cream sauce.

My dining companion said he had never eaten such delicious mushrooms in his life and told me not to worry about food pedigrees when things tasted this good.

Trying Russian Food in Pacific Grove (California)


When my dining companions’ order of Beef Stroganoff arrived, it looked worthy of the man it was named after.  Darra Goldstein relates in her cookbook A la Russe that while 19^th century Russian revered all things French, they secretly harbored a love for their own cuisine.

Count Pavel Stroganoff, whose family had made a fortune developing land in Siberia, had an inventive French chef who appealed to his benefactor’s dual tastes by adding sour cream to a basic French mustard sauce.

Stroganoff’s chef added this sauce to tender, sautéed tenderloin strips.

Pagrovia has improved on the basic recipe by adding chopped porcini mushrooms and serving it with perfectly al dente egg noodles.

I liked the Beef Stroganoff my dining companion ordered better than the barashka I ordered.  This dish comes with tender chunks of tender lamb, large slices of carrot, and celery in tomato sauce – all served over mashed potatoes.

I think adding a little salt to the sauce would have enhanced the flavor.  A few renegade lumps in the mashed potatoes let me know that the chef mashed the potatoes by hand, but I wish he had used a little more butter and milk in their preparation.

While I was talking with the chef about how he used to feed 6,000 people a day as a chef on a US Navy ship, my dining mate devoured the tiramisu he ordered for dessert.  He left a little bite for me on a saucer, because that is what I had requested him to do.  (2018 Note – I’m sure he was thinking, “If you ask for two tic tacs that is what you get for dessert.)

I have two book recommendations to make about Russian food:

-The Food and Cooking of Russia by Lesley Chamberlain

-Classic Russian Cooking: A Gift to Young Housewives by Elena Molokhovets

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Ruth Paget Selfie