In honor of National Prescription Drug Take Back Day, the Redwood City Police Department is holding a prescription drug take back event this Saturday, Oct. 27.
The event is set to run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Redwood City Police Substation at 2223 Broadway.
Such events are safe, convenient and responsible ways to dispose of unused or expired prescription drugs.
By Bill Shilstone
An audience of anxious and sometimes angry parents filled the McKinley Institute of Technology auditorium Monday night to hear Redwood City School District Supt. John Baker explain how they can be heard before the board adopts a reorganization plan Nov. 28.
Alternatives that include closing and merging some of the district’s 16 schools have been prepared by an advisory committee to meet a $10 million budget shortfall created by steadily declining enrollment.
Parents Monday night expressed frustration that the meeting format did not allow them to share the microphone with Baker, that there has not been enough time for their input, and that the individual proposals do not include cost-saving figures.
Baker said the figures would be made available and invited email or telephone feedback to him or board members between now and Nov. 28. He has read 235 emails so far, he said.
Monday’s feedback was in the form of comments written on post-it notes – orange for con and green for pro – pasted to poster boards mounted in the hallways, one for each proposal. “Yes. No-Brainer” for closing the district office and moving it to a school site. “Families are going to leave regardless of what you do. Create equity and use this opportunity to … create an equitable school district.” Most were written in Spanish, reflecting the district’s 70 percent Hispanic enrollment.
“We’re going to come out of this better than we came in,” Baker said. “This is an opportunity to rethink how we educate our students. No matter what the decision, many will not be happy, but we are going to make it work, and your input is essential.” He then spelled out how the input will happen.
The link to the proposals is here.
The public has three more chances to weigh in at community forums, then will be able to look at and respond to Baker’s semi-final and final recommendations to the board, which will be posted with board agendas the Fridays before the Nov. 14 and Nov. 28 meetings.
The next forum is Thursday at 6 p.m. at Taft School, 903 10th Ave., Redwood City. The final two will be Thursday, Nov. 1, the first at 8:30 a.m. at Hoover Community School, 701 Charter St., and the second at 6 p.m. at Kennedy Middle School, 2521 Goodwin Ave.
The Nov. 14 regular board meeting will be a public hearing and board discussion on Baker’s recommendations. Baker then will make a final recommendation for board action Nov. 28.
“We’re going to have to find a bigger venue,” he said, looking out at the overflow audience. Police had to clear the aisles, moving people onto the stage, before Baker could continue.
Trustee Dennis McBride responded to shouting audience members by apologizing for the “less than ideal process” but said the board could not have proceeded differently and that there still is enough time for feedback.
Community members still have time to donate handmade items, primarily scarves but also hats, socks, gloves and more, to the fun Chase the Chill program in Redwood City.
In its third year, the charitable program collects the handmade items through the end of October. Then, in mid-to-late November, the items are hung at multiple locations around Redwood City for people in need to find and keep. The items will feature tags that read, in both English and Spanish, “I belong to no one, take me if you like me or if you need me.”
In its first year, about 400 scarves were hung up around town. Last year, that went up to 600. Organizer Jodi Paley aims to increase that number again this year.
Those wishing to donate handmade items are encouraged to drop them off at the bins at Veterans Memorial Senior Center (VMSC) on Madison. the Community Activities Building (CAB) on Roosevelt, the Main Library, City Hall, Redwood Shores Library and Fair Oaks Community Center on Middlefield Road.
Also coming up: a Chase the Chill tagging party is set to be held at the CAB on Nov. 7. At the event, volunteers are needed to help administer the tags with the aforementioned messaging onto the donated items. The party starts at 6 p.m., and pizza will be provided.
For Chase the Chill updates, see its Facebook page here.
Gail Waldo and her Black Lick Rich Licorice (say that fast 10 times) might sound familiar to you: We featured her in our August issue’s Microclimate. We also said, “Next stop: Halloween,” and guess what, Halloween is around the corner. So as we enter the year’s “sugariest” holiday season (sorry, Easter) we want to take a deeper dive into Waldo’s licorice world; to get her thoughts on everything from why she makes such a polarizing candy to the sweet recipe she thinks everyone should be making this Halloween season (Spoiler alert: it’s not licorice).
Up until this past year, Waldo, didn’t even like black licorice. As a child, she’d abandon the black twists and beans of her trick-or-treat haul, leaving the discards for “Pop,” her father, who loved the stuff. It wasn’t until Waldo mastered her own recipe of old-fashioned, cut-plug black licorice that her taste buds turned a corner. One bite of Waldo’s candy and it makes sense. Hers is a gateway licorice. Cut into little logs not unlike elongated Tootsie Rolls, they’re rich but with a buttery, caramel flavor and texture that will convert even the ardent anise hater.
So how did Waldo come to make a candy she didn’t even like, and then commit an entire year to tweaking and perfecting the recipe? That is a blend of chance, nostalgia, and a tendency for things that are “weird.”
“I like that it [black licorice] is weird, it’s different. No one knows they can make it at home,” Waldo said. In fact, she wasn’t even looking to make black licorice when she stumbled upon the fateful link that caught her eye. It was in the sidebar while she was searching for Oreo truffles, and when she saw it, it made her think of Pop, then a mere 100 years old. She decided to give it a try. When she didn’t like the results, she set her mind to fixing it.
Meeting Waldo, it makes sense she would make an old-fashioned, “who-knew-you-could-do-it-at-home?” candy. From the outside, she is quirky and artsy; a typesetting graphic designer with blunt cut bangs and a licorice-filled zipper pouch she jokingly calls her “humidor.” She’s by no means a retro caricature, but there is an air of time traveler to her. Maybe it simply comes down to her penchant for old-timey candy — in addition to making black licorice, she used to make for Pop another vintage treat, a spicy, rootbeer-like candy called horehound. Or maybe it’s because she’s only two generations removed from the Civil War: Her grandfather was born before — yes, before — the war began. But somehow, it all comes together — her family, her creativity, her love of sweets — and it does so in a way that makes perfect sense that she would be the woman to bring to new heights a candy that only operations like Haribo and Twizzlers dare to make.
Waldo and her business partner, Ken Seydel, just started selling their caramelly rolls of black licorice this summer. Father’s Day was their first appearance at the Redwood City Farmer’s Market, an unintentional but poignant nod to Pop, who never got to try the final product. Shortly after their debut they were invited to sell at Williams-Sonoma in Palo Alto, as a part of the store’s local artisans’ program. It’s safe to say the future for Waldo and her second career as a candymaker may be black, but it is anything but dark.
Recipe
Chocolate Oreo Truffles*
Adapted from Whatscookingamerica.net
This is the recipe that started it all, the recipe Waldo was looking for when she first spotted the link for homemade black licorice. These truffles are so rich and chocolatey, it’s hard to believe that they’re made with Oreos. They’re also incredibly easy to prepare, making this a kid-friendly recipe for little goblin helpers and the perfect homemade Halloween treat!
Makes 40-50 truffles, depending on the size
Ingredients
1 package (1 pound, 2 oz) Oreo cookies
1 (8 oz) package cream cheese, at room temperature
2 (8oz) packages semi-sweet chocolate chips (or Wilton candy melts)
Optional toppings: chopped Oreos, chopped nuts, cocoa powder, powdered sugar, colored sugar/sprinkles, Heath Bar Crunch bits, etc.)
Directions
1. Line two large cookie sheets with wax or parchment paper.
2. Remove the cream filling from Oreos (this step isn’t necessary, but Waldo says it helps!).
3. In a food processor, crush the Oreos cookies into fine crumbs. If you don’t have a food processor, you can also crush them by putting them in a zip lock bag and crushing them with a rolling pin.
4. Add the cream cheese (and the cookie cream filling, if you separated it) to the food processor (or bowl if you’re doing everything by hand) and thoroughly mix until you have a creamy dough. Make sure there are no white traces of cream cheese.
5. Using your hands, roll the dough into walnut-size balls, about ¾-inch diameter. If the dough gets too soft, pop it in the fridge to chill slightly.
6. Place the dough balls on the lined baking sheet and refrigerate for at least 45-60 minutes.
a. The dough balls can be stored in the freezer for up to one week before being dipped in chocolate.
7. Now it’s time to melt the chocolate! You have a couple of options here:
a. If you’re using candy melts, follow the melting instructions on the package.
b. If you’re using chocolate chips, you can use a double-boiler or the microwave.
i. Double-boiler: Place a glass bowl over a pot of simmering water. Make sure the water is not touching the bowl. Add the chocolate to the glass bowl, stirring it until smooth and melted. Be careful to make sure the steam from the water doesn’t get into the chocolate. This will cause the chocolate to “seize,” which is what it’s called when chocolate gets grainy. Also, be careful not to overheat the chocolate. This will take the chocolate out of “temper,” which is what gives chocolate that nice snap when you break it.
ii. Microwave: Add the chocolate chips to a microwave-safe bowl. Set the microwave to either “defrost” or 10% power. Microwave for one minute, and then check and stir. If the chocolate needs to melt a little bit more, pop it back in, but only for 10-20 second intervals, stirring and checking the chocolate after each one. Again, you don’t want to over melt because you’ll take the chocolate out of temper.
8. Once the chocolate is melted, using a small fork, skewer or chopstick, lower each ball of dough, one at a time, into the melted chocolate. Once the ball is covered in chocolate, carefully lift it out of the bowl, allowing any excess chocolate to drip off (you can gently tap the fork on the rim of the bowl to help this process).
9. Place the Oreo Truffle Ball onto the wax paper. If you’re adding any additional chopped toppings, sprinkle now, before the chocolate hardens (except the cocoa powder or powdered sugar. If you’re sprinkling either of those on, wait until the chocolate has hardened, otherwise it will melt into the warm chocolate). If you’re adding any candy melt decoration (say, a drizzle of another color of candy melt) wait until the chocolate shell has hardened.
10. Once hardened, store finished Oreo Truffle Balls in an airtight container in the refrigerator. Keep the truffles refrigerated or frozen prior to serving.
*Hoping for her black licorice recipe? Nice try — It took a year for Waldo to perfect it, she’s not sharing those secrets anytime soon!
A horse that ended up stuck in a ditch at San Macdonald Park near La Honda can thank the muscle of patience of San Mateo County first responders.
The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office released photos today from the recent incident involving the horse, named Cody, and his owner Chris Smith. The horse ended up in a “very awkward predicament” while riding in Sam Macdonald Park.
“…We found ourselves stuck in a deep ditch, unable to climb out,” Smith told the sheriff’s office. “With help from La Honda Fire, San Mateo County Rangers, San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office, and CalFire, Cody was safely returned to solid ground.”
Smith naturally expressed gratitude to all who helped in the effort.
“We are so thankful for the team effort made to help this wonderful animal and his family,” the sheriff’s office said.
October is LGBTQ+ History Month, are you familiar with our local LGBTQ+ organizations?
The San Mateo County Pride Center was the first ever LGBTQ+ community center in San Mateo County. Whether seeking behavioral health services or gathering in solidarity with others to share stories, build relationships, learn, grow, and heal together, LGBTQ+ individuals and communities throughout the Peninsula have a space to call their own.
Outlet, in Redwood City, empowers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning youth and builds safe and accepting communities through support, education and advocacy. It is a youth centered organization which services support the emotional, physical, and social development of youth as whole individuals.
In support and awareness of LGBTQ+ History Month, Redwood City Public libraries created a history-rich reading list, check it out here, if you’re interested!
Derek Wolfgram has two passions – books and beer. Redwood City’s head librarian – currently serving as the city’s interim human-resources director – has been cooking up homebrewed suds for nearly two decades.
It comes as little surprise that he has learned much about beer from books – most notably, “The Complete Joy of Home Brewing,” by Charlie Papazian. But it would be a mistake to cast Wolfgram as just a beer-making bookworm. A lot of the homebrewing world revolves around clubs of amateur brewers, and he enjoys the social aspect as much as his research into how to craft the perfect Belgian blonde ale.
Wolfgram, named “Mr. Sesquicentennial” in Redwood City’s recent 150th-anniversary celebration, belongs to the Silicon Valley Sudzers, one of the area’s larger homebrew organizations. He also writes a monthly newspaper column about beer for the Los Altos Town Crier. Beyond making the rounds with his beer-making friends, he says he enjoys brewing as a creative endeavor.
“Some people might be good at painting or drawing or other arts,” the 47-year-old Wolfgram says. “I guess brewing is the art that I express myself through. I enjoy the process. …The recipe-development aspect is kind of a fun combination of art and science. You get to be creative in how you put ingredients together, but there also needs to be some understanding of how things interact with each other, and what temperature you need to do things at in order to get the right chemical reactions to end up with the final product that you want.”
People who knew Wolfgram in college might be surprised by his hobby. As a student at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, he was perhaps history’s only undergraduate who didn’t like beer.
“My friends all drank cheap American lagers, which didn’t taste good to me,” he explains. “Somewhere along the way, somebody introduced me to Pete’s Wicked Ale, which was a brown ale but was like nothing I’d ever quite tasted before. That sort of got me interested in beer.”
By then, Wolfgram had graduated and was living in Cleveland, where he discovered a bar that served German and English beers. From then on, he enjoyed drinking and learning about beer, but never thought about making it until Christmas of 2000. That was when his wife, Robin, got him a simple home-brew kit.
Wolfgram started making beer on his own, with ever-improving results. He learned the joys of brewing with others when in 2006 he moved across the country to become director of the library for Butte County, at the northern end of the Sacramento Valley. He and his wife didn’t have children and didn’t attend church, which Wolfgram describes as the main avenues for meeting people in the area. Instead, they discovered the Chico Home Brew Club.
“I just found all of these really welcoming, interesting people that knew a lot about beer and were interested in sharing what they knew,” Wolfgram recalls. “That sort of became part of the hub of our social life in Butte County. So when we moved to the Bay Area in 2009, one of the first things I did was look for where the homebrew clubs were.”
Living in San Jose, he quickly joined the Sudzers and has been active with the organization ever since. Historically, he says, homebrewing has been fairly male-dominated, but he describes the Sudzers as “a pretty diverse group … there are a lot of women who are really interested in homebrewing now.”
Often, Wolfgram says, brewing in Silicon Valley attracts engineers, who enjoy the hobby’s chemistry and potential for acquiring (or even building) new gadgets.
“They get into putting together the perfect system,” Wolfgram observes. One homemade device he’s seen is a temperature probe that sends a Wi-Fi signal to a cell phone, “so while you’re at work, you can keep track of how your fermentation is going on in your beer.”
Jack Stephens of Redwood City is among the engineers who enjoy homebrewing. A software designer and tester, Stephens got into beermaking in his twenties when he moved into a large group house in Los Altos Hills during the early 1990s. Stephens and a friend were seeking a communal life, and it turned out to be luxurious – with beer attached.
“It had four acres, an indoor pool, an outdoor pool and an apple orchard,” Stephens says. “The back property line was David Packard’s apricot orchards. It was a palace. One of the guys was a homebrewer, having been turned onto it by a friend of his. He got me into the hobby, and we ended up building a crazed apparatus out of 19-inch computer-equipment racks and gravity-fed, Rube-Goldberg-looking contraptions and whatnot. At that same time, because we had a four-acre place and we were renting and we were 20, we threw some bell-ringer Halloween parties. We and 400 of our closest friends, that kind of thing.”
Eventually the housemates went their own ways, but the Halloween parties continued, becoming known as the “Brew-ha-ha.” This year will mark the 25th such event, although it will be smaller (with around 100 to 150 revelers) than the originals. They’re invitation-only, but Stephens welcomes new people who have a sincere interest in beer. (To try to snag an invite, email Stephens at jms@140fulton.com.)
Right now, Stephens says, he has six different brews fermenting in his garage. As for the hobby in general, he says, it contains four essential components.
“It’s fun, it’s as challenging as you want to make it, and it’s a social activity if you want it to be,” he says. “It’s often a lot of fun just to hang around with your brew buddies and see what you can do with a new recipe. And it’s also just the appropriate amount of quirky and arcane. Every normal activity has a specialized word, and there are weird and wonderful bits of gear. You could do it with a bucket with some holes in it, but it’s more fun to call it a mash tun.”
Getting started, Wolfgram and Stephens agree, takes little investment and only slightly more skill. Simple home-brew kits start at around $100, and a passing grade in high-school chemistry isn’t required. At the same time, prospective hobbyists should be warned that, like an old set of golf clubs, a homebrew starter kit may soon leave one yearning to invest more … and more … and more.
“It’s like any hobby,” says Jim Fortes, a retired information-technology manager from Pacific Gas and Electric and a longtime member of the Hetch Hetchy Hop Heads, a Redwood City homebrew club. “If you just kind of start out and say, ‘Okay, I’ll just play with it once in a while,’ it’s not so bad. But if you’re a guy like me, who likes to do his own stuff, you start getting involved and you start spending thousands of dollars.”
Fortes estimates he brews between 150 and 200 gallons of beer each year. His favorite: A pale ale that he describes as “a Sierra Nevada clone.”
The notion of homebrew clubs might conjure visions of rowdy, beer-guzzling folks whose behavior might reflect the name of another local outfit, Menlo Park-based Bitches and Studs Brew Club. In fact, Fortes says, homebrewers are a relatively sedate crowd more interested in sampling than swilling.
“It’s really a family kind of a deal,” Fortes says, “in that you can get together and have a good time and talk about, ‘Hey, how did you make this?’ For the most part, with homebrewing, I haven’t met anybody that I wouldn’t want to have a beer with.”
Wolfgram, who moved to Redwood City in 2016 after accepting the librarian job, has even taken beermaking off the bookshelves. His presentations on homebrewing at various libraries have attracted serious hobbyists and the simply curious. Despite his longtime interest in beer, however, he has no ambition to open his own microbrewery.
“There’s an old joke,” he says. “How do end up with a million dollars with a brewery? Start with 10 million.”
Even if he sees little commercial potential, Wolfgram still considers homebrewing a terrific hobby.
“I find it relaxing,” he says. “And there’s the social component of sharing it with not only other homebrewers, but just with friends and family. And then, of course, any hobby where the end result is that you have some great beer at home – that’s a pretty good outcome.”
Beginning on Oct. 15 and running through Oct. 29, Engine 12 has been relocated to a Woodside Fire Station located nearby at 4091 Jefferson Avenue due to unanticipated construction scheduled at Redwood City Fire Station 12.
The relocation will not impact public safety services. The closest active Fire Stations to Station 12 during the temporary relocation will be stations located at 4091 Jefferson Avenue and 2190 Jefferson Avenue in Redwood City.
Ballots finally are showing up in San Mateo County mailboxes, more than a week after they were supposed to be in the hands of voters.
The all-mail ballots are a grand experiment in democracy with a lot of things to recommend it, but the reason for the delay is mundane, problematic and potentially consequential.
The problem, in a nutshell, is that the elections officials, under the management of Mark Church, San Mateo County’s elections chief, left a race off the ballot. Specifically, it is the race for the San Mateo County Board of Education. The board members run for the seats from a district, but they’re elected countywide.
Apparently, someone thought the election was district-only, and didn’t include it in all the county ballots. A delay ensued while a separate page was prepared solely for the Board of Education, which explains why there’s a page in your ballot with a huge amount of blank space and only one item on it.
This is the second time in recent elections that something was omitted from the ballot, the other being a race for local judgeship.
Church was re-elected in June with token opposition to the post of Clerk-Recorder-Assessor, a job that puts him in charge, among other things, of all local elections. While it’s an independent office, he doesn’t have control over the size of his budget – that’s set by the Board of Supervisors.
The budget is relevant because Church has been known to assert that his office is under-funded and, therefore, understaffed.
Which could be an explanation, but it’s certainly no excuse. Particularly when San Mateo County is at the center of a huge experiment in all-mail balloting.
I’m a big fan of vote-by-mail. I like the idea of voters taking time to go over their ballots, rather than hurriedly whipping through it while standing at a voting station with other voters lined up behind.
I like to think it prompts more people to vote and that they will spend time culling through social media to inform themselves about the down-ballot races, such as city councils, school boards and city ballot measures.
Certainly, the all-mail balloting can be credited for an extraordinary voter turnout in the June statewide gubernatorial primary – 44.3 percent voter turnout compared to 27.5 percent in the 2014 June gubernatorial primary.
So, put me down as an enthusiastic supporter, assuming the people in charge of the elections do their jobs properly.
Mundane: Someone who knows what’s on the ballot should have checked it and re-checked it. Whatever Quality Assurance steps are in place weren’t good enough.
Problematic: If one of the benefits of all-mail balloting is the time voters have to go over the ballot and consider all the races, sending the ballots out more than a week late may meet some legal requirement, but it certainly doesn’t serve the larger purpose.
Consequential: Even though he has just been re-elected, there already is speculation in political circles about a challenge to Church in four years. The names making the rounds include state Senator Jerry Hill, who is termed out of office in 2020, Assemblyman Kevin Mullin, whose legislative record includes substantial time and attention to election and campaign issues, including sponsorship of the bill that made it possible for the all-mail balloting, and Virginia Chang Kiraly, current member of the San Mateo County Harbor Commission and the Menlo Park Fire Protection District Board of Directors.
Full disclosure: Mullin and I co-host a public affairs show, The Game, on Peninsula TV. The mention of his name here was done without his knowledge and is not an attempt by him to float a trial balloon. The same can be said, by the way, about Hill and Kiraly – the trial balloon part, not the TV show part.
Shameless plug: Kevin and I will be co-hosting a live Election Night show on Pen TV from 8 p.m. until the last results are in and digested. It’s the only place devoted exclusively to the local races you’re following.
Contact Mark Simon at mark.simon24@yahoo.com.
*The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Climate Online.
The City of Redwood City is inviting the community to try out a pop-up protected bike lane on El Camino Real in front of the BevMo between Cedar and Chestnut streets on Saturday.
The event, which will include informational booths, will run from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and aims to show residents what a protected bike lane might look and feel like on El Camino Real, which is currently being studied for improvements. Learn more about the El Camino Real Corridor Plan at www.redwoodcity.org/elcaminoplan
