A few months ago a delightful Indian couple, Kajal and Shalendra, bought the franchise for our UPS Store. They joined the Oakley Chamber of Commerce about the same time I did. This morning they hosted the March Breakfast with the Mayor for chamber members, where we got an update on the planned changes to Main Street as well as the construction associate with the new Carpaccio’s/La Costa building.

As I understand it, the idea is to create (or perhaps re-create) an actual downtown area for Oakley, starting with the area around City Hall and Carpaccio’s. That means narrowing the street and adding a center divider and some angle parking and potted trees, with the aim of slowing down automobile traffic and encouraging more foot traffic. The hope is that the trucks that whip past at high speed—as we all noticed during the groundbreaking ceremony—will use the former Bypass Road (now officially Highway 4) instead of coming down Main Street.

What I want to know is why they didn’t start using the Bypass Road from the minute it was built. It’s a better, faster, road, as long as you’re going where it takes you. Surely some of the trucks must have started using it before the handover ceremony, and the ones that are still driving down Main Street have another reason to do so, unless it’s just habit. (The desire to eat at La Costa and the Black Bear diner, maybe?)

Statue in the Red Men/Pocahontas Museum, Oakley, CA

Yesterday at the groundbreaking ceremony for Carpaccio Ristorante, Jim and Shirley Darling invited my husband and me to the monthly breakfast offered at the Red Men and Pocahontas Hall. The Improved Order of Red Men is a fraternal organization dedicated to charitable work, primarily Alzheimer’s research.

It does not, in fact, actually have any relationship to any of the Indian nations, and originally admitted only white men.  It is, however, descended from the sons of Liberty, who patterned themselves after the Iroquois Confederacy. Back in 1765, no one would have been worrying about whether people more than 200 years later would think their name was politically correct, and of course the sexes were segregated, so the Degree of Pocahontas has a separate charter, though in practice the two groups seem to consist substantially of husbands and wives and to work together most of the time. Combining the two groups would have required abandoning the existing charter and applying for a new one.

So Jim, who is the historian for the Oakley “tribe”, explained to me while showing us around the local museum. (There are better photos on Oakley Mayor Kevin Romick’s blog.)

After that we sat down to the business of eating breakfast and meeting people. Breakfast is 2 slices of bacon, 2 sausages, 2 eggs, and unlimited pancakes or biscuits and gravy, for $4/person. The people were mostly somewhere over 70, except for a couple about our own age (somewhere in the forty-ahum range) who came in later in the morning, all friendly, and in many cases fascinating sources of information about the Oakley of decades past.

Richard, who sat across from us with his girlfriend Alice, was born and raised here; in fact, his grandfather came to Oakley in 1898, when (as my husband put it), they might have had the one horse, but not yet the town. Richard remembers walking back from Antioch High down E. 18th/Main St after football games and never seeing a single car. (It’s now a four-lane road and pretty heavily trafficked, by local standards; you certainly wouldn’t walk down the middle of it, day or night.) You could hitch a ride on a freight train, though, to get home faster. (In those days, Oakley still had a train station, but in any case the freight trains moved slowly enough to jump onto and off.)

Alice is a comparative newcomer: she arrived in 1966 with her husband (now deceased) and children after several years traveling all over the US for his work in the steel industry. By that time she’d learned to talk directly to the school superintendent in a new district to make sure her kids would be treated properly. Mary Lou came with her Cherokee mother 83 years ago, at the age of two. (You wouldn’t believe she was 85 to look at her, but then, her mother lived to be 95.) Back in those days, Antioch (the local “big city”, remember) only had a population of 2,000.

Even 25 years ago when the younger couple next to us arrived, the housing developments on Vintage Parkway were just being built (our own house went up in 1988) and the only grocery store was CentrOMart; Raley’s didn’t go in until a few years later. (I wonder whether the used bookstore with the splendid antique cash registers was already in business. I somehow suspect so, but will have to ask the owner.)

We also learned that the reason the body of water nearest us is called the Big Break is because that’s exactly what happened: a levee broke in 1928 and let water in to what was once an asparagus field. (More details on the East Bay Regional Parks website.) During Richard’s childhood, the land that now makes up the three housing developments off Vintage Parkway was all open wetlands, where he used to hunt for rabbits.

There are tribes of the Improved Red Men in many cities, and surely groups of local elders in every town, but it’s not everywhere that new residents get invited to join them for breakfast. Thanks to Jim and Shirley for inviting us and to Jane and everyone in the kitchen, and apologies to anyone whose name I didn’t remember or may have misspelled.

And even without that, River Delta = Wetlands, so you’d expect (or I would) that the place might be prone to flooding, or at least a lot of marshiness and standing water, during the rainy season. As this is the driest winter we’ve had since I moved to California at the end of 1998, it’s very hard for my husband to picture that, but it makes sense to me that all the newer houses, like the ones I remember seeing on the Outer Banks, are built with the main living areas raised at least one story off the ground and large garage/storage areas below. (The architectural style, however, is not much like that on the East Coast.)

Of course, it’s possible that people just want to be able to see the view over the water, too.

I think I’ll just have to ask a resident (perhaps Sherrill Riggs, owner of the Sugar Barge RV Resort & Marina, whom I met through the Brentwood Chamber of Commerce) about the logic, if any, behind the odd juxtaposition between decaying older homes and enormous new ones. The fact that a number of the newer places are for sale indicates that the Great Recession has hit the Delta just as hard as anywhere else (if not harder, since the construction industry was a major employer out here), but signs of poverty go back well before the Dot-Com bust, never mind the 2008 crash. And you can snap up one of the older houses for less than $50K, while the big ones will set you back ten times that much—a bargain by the standards of San Francisco, but pretty pricey for this area.

While it’s not actually possible to circumnavigate the island by car, our drive first down Piper Road, then back through town and down Taylor Rd, came close to accomplishing that. We still haven’t been down Stone Rd to the main marina, though.

Bethel Island, for those unfamiliar with the Delta, is a “census-designated place” with a population of about 2100 a few miles from Oakley. It’s just barely an island, since the sloughs dividing it from Jersey Island, the Holland Tract, and the mainland are pretty narrow.

In any case, it makes Oakley look like a teeming metropolis. There are cows, goats, horses, and the occasional dead skunk, as well as a good 300 acres of empty land for sale.

The first time we went there, about a month ago, we drove up Bethel Island Road to Gateway Road and out all the way to the water, thus landing at Frank’s Marina, which is abandoned. The map I bought today says that next to Frank’s Marina is Riverview Harbor, and then Lundborg Landing. What we saw was a deserted RV park used as a dumping ground.

As a member of the Oakley Chamber of Commerce, I get invited to all the official city events, as well as to the chamber events. I’ve never officially joined a chamber of commerce before, though I visited the one in El Cerrito. This year I joined two at once (Oakley, where I live, and Brentwood, the next town over), the better to get to know the place I live and the people who live here. The chamber mixers and other events are convivial and frequently hilarious in a good-natured, small-town way. As  a home-based business, I probably won’t be hosting a Breakfast with the Mayor or a chamber mixer any time soon, but I’m certainly going to keep attending them.

This morning at 10 AM there was a groundbreaking ceremony for Carpaccio Ristorante at Oakley Plaza around the corner from us. The restaurant is due to move from Antioch to Oakley as soon as the new building is finished, possibly as early as this summer. (From empty lot to open restaurant between March and September seems optimistic to me, but then again, we saw a housing development appear pretty much overnight out on Laurel Road.)

Since I live within walking distance of Oakley Plaza, I could hardly avoid going. My husband—not enthusiastic about early-morning activities in general, and less so after staying up late with dinner guests—wanted to know what was going to be so ground-breaking about the ceremony. On the one hand, it was typical of its kind: a few remarks from the mayor, Kevin Romick, from the restaurant owner, Manuel Muñoz (no, that doesn’t sound Italian to me, either), from the architect, from the city manager, Brian Montgomery. Photos of the city council members and the restaurateur with shiny shovels and hard hats. Refreshments and conversation. Sunshine and good cheer—and a lot of traffic noise from Main Street.

Program from the March 3, 2012 groundbreaking ceremony for Carpaccio Ristorante in Oakley, CA

There were at least half a dozen people there with cameras, but I didn’t have mine. The first to be posted (that I’ve seen, anyway) are on Mike Burkholder’s blog. You can even see me in one of them.

Update 3-4-2012: Mike has kindly given me permission to insert one of his photos here, so here it is:

The audience at the Carpaccio's groundbreaking ceremony. Photo by Mike Burkholder.

In all honesty, I think they had to bring the dirt in along with the shovels, because otherwise there would have been nothing but pavement. But if the soil was fake, the enthusiasm was genuine. Vice Mayor Carol Rios explained how excited all the city employees were when City Hall was built. The manager of the Black Bear Diner across the street came to congratulate Muñoz and his family. Jim Darling invited us to breakfast tomorrow at the Order of Red Men (originally Sons of Liberty).

It’s a long way from everything, but I do like it here.

Anyway, the last time I cooked a breast of lamb, I’d bought the boneless version and stuffed it with something—ground veal, I think. This time around, I had those bones to contend with, and I really didn’t want to engage in the fuss of playing butcher, though I do possess a boning knife. I figured that if I made use of my handy pressure cooker, I wouldn’t have to worry about bones.

I was right, but I couldn’t actually locate any recipes for breast of lamb that involved the pressure cooker. In fact, most of the recipes I could find really made preparing it out to be entirely too much work. So I pretty much made it up as I went along, and it worked splendidly, so I’m sharing it here.

Start-to-finish time

About 90 minutes

Time actually spent cooking

About 30 minutes

Ingredients

• 1.5-2 lbs bone-in breast of lamb
• 1 Tb olive oil
• 1/2 clove elephant garlic or 2 cloves ordinary garlic, peeled and chopped
• 2 Tb balsamic vinegar
• pinch rosemary
• pinch sage
• salt and pepper

Tools

• Heavy skillet
• Pressure cooker

Heat the 1 Tb olive oil in the heavy skillet over a high flame and brown the meat on all sides along with about half the garlic. (Breast of lamb is a very fatty cut, so you won’t need more than 1 Tb oil and could probably make do with less.) Transfer meat and garlic to pressure cooker.

Add remaining ingredients and approximately 4 cups water to pressure cooker. Seal and bring to pressure. Reduce heat until you are just maintaining pressure and cook for 45 minutes. (If you have an old-fashioned pressure cooker, the weight on the top should rock gently. Otherwise you risk boiling off all the water and burning the lamb and the pot. [If you're an experienced user of pressure cookers, you can talk to me about grandmothers and sucking eggs now.])

Turn off heat and run pressure cooker under cold water to release pressure. Transfer lamb from pressure cooker to a heatproof dish. Carefully remove the bones. By now the meat should be so tender that the bones slide out easily—what you need to be careful about is burning yourself. (Latex exam gloves are good for this.)

If you want to crisp the lamb up, you can pop it under the broiler for about 5 minutes after you’ve removed the bones. If you’re the gravy-making type, you can pour the fat out of the pressure cooker (there will be a lot of it) and make up some gravy while the lamb is crisping. Otherwise just serve it up with your choice of side dishes.

Makes 3-4 four-ounce servings.

Hair, makeup, and most photos by the amazing Kathleena Gorga—taken, alas, with my Nikon P100, which doesn’t do RAW images.