Calendar: Two Thousand Ten: April

April's calendar photo is of tulips at Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. I love the picture and knew I wanted it in the calendar; I assigned it to April because that is the month of my sister's birthday, and tulips are considered "her" flower in my family, since my mom's tulips seem to bloom right around Mary's birthday.

My mom and I went to the Isle of Skye at the midpoint of our trip to Scotland. Our itinerary was: Sunday-Tuesday morning: Edinburgh (point A on the map below); Tuesday, train to Inverness (point B/D), drive to the Isle of Skye (C). Wednesday, explore Skye; Thursday drive back to Inverness and stay there, Friday, train to Glasgow (E). Friday & Saturday we explored Glasgow, and on Sunday my mom left from Edinburgh. We were very busy!

Looking at the map, I'm impressed at how much ground we covered. We had reservations for much of the trip, but not for Skye. Thanks to my friend Joe, I had a cell phone with me, so was able to make calls to a few lodging places on Skye from the train from Edinburgh. We settled on a hotel in the harbor town of Portree, and arrived in gloomy weather with lovely light.

Much of Portree is above the harbor itself, and our hotel was down a the water level. We had a hard time finding the sharp turnoff for the road that led down the hill to the waterfront! The harbor of Portree is featured in many photographs of Skye, because the town itself is the main town on the island, and there is a lovely row of brightly-painted houses down at the harbor level; our hotel is in the photo below, the white building diagonally across from/to the right of the row of colorful buildings.

We had dinner one night in the building in the middle (yellow on top, dark blue on the bottom). I believe I had fish & chips, but I know I had a traditional Scottish dessert called Cranachan at the end of the meal. It's basically whisky-infused whipped cream with raspberries and toasted oats. Yum!

The rest of the time on Skye we spent driving about to Dunvegan Castle and the Talisker Distillery - though it poured on us while we were at the Castle, it did clear in the late afternoon:

Be it Resolved that April is Cookbook Exploitation Month

Like so many of us, I have a lot of cookbooks. I do try to weed them occasionally (when I worked in a public library, I was the type of librarian who loved getting rid of unused books), but I just counted and I have over thirty, plus an accordian file full of both tried and untried recipes collected over the years.

I recently came across this Casual Kitchen blog post, declaring that April is Cookbook Exploitation Month. The idea: pick an underused cookbook from your collection, and vow to cook at least once from it each week in April.

Well, my vote is in, and I will be using Cooking Light Annual Recipes - 2006 edition. I spent some time flipping through it, and I like that it is rich in indexes! Aside from the usual alphabetical index, there's also a menu index which seems to reflect regular features in the print magazine, such as Simple Suppers, Casual Entertaining, Vegetarian, and Global Kitchen. Another index lists the recipes by title, and yet another groups the recipes as they appeared in each month's issue, organized by the article or feature that they appeared in. I think that may wind up being especially helpful for me when I want to cook seasonally.


So far my complaints are two: lack of photos (though there are some, and at any rate should be expected in an annual compilation!) and that there is not a good way to find all the vegetarian offerings, which are what I would use for lunch group. Still, I've already bookmarked a couple of recipes, and am bound to find more! I will probably start with Polenta with Spinach, Black Beans, and Goat Cheese. Hmm, or maybe I'll do Orecchiette and Arugula with Creamy Ricotta Sauce. OR Pasta Risotto with Fennel?

So many ideas!

Quick Trip: California Poppy Reserve

Last week I flew to Southern California and went on a short road trip with my mom and one of her friends. We drove from Claremont, to the California Poppy Reserve, to Tehachapi.

This year has been an El Nino winter, with extra rain, so we hoped to catch some of the desert blooming. We did okay, but I think the trip is worth doing again in a few years (assuming there's rain) to see if we can do even better! Still, we saw lots of flowers, part of the country I'd never seen, and had a good time.

Joshua trees are WAY strange-looking. Not at all what I imagined. This one is starting to bloom - see that white on one of the topmost .. um.. branch-things? Here's a close up of another tree's bloom:

Note those spiny thorns at the end of each .. leaf-thing. I got a picture of The Traveling Dude, who did not seem to mind the spikes:

And yes: flowers!

So very very wrong

As the saying goes: If this is wrong, I don't want to be right.

In my case, at the moment, my oh-so-wrong addiction is to asparagus. I tend to have seasonal devotion to foods (winter being Brussels sprouts & sweet potatoes, roasted together), and this spring I've been bitten harder than ever before by the Asparagus Bug.

I keep it pretty easy, too: toss the asparagus in olive oil, sprinkle with salt & pepper, roast at 400 degrees for about 15 minutes. Lately I've taken to making a meal of it by adding egg. A couple of times I've soft-boiled an egg or two, peeled the egg, then sliced it onto the asparagus.

Today, I learned how to poach eggs! My motivation was an article reporting that the majority of people surveyed (I can't find the article right now so don't know if it was Americans or Britons) couldn't poach an egg. That bugged me - if someone asked me I'd have to admit that I couldn't, though I was perfectly confident that I could follow directions to do so!

It's crazy-easy:
combine water, 1 tsp salt, 2 Tbsp vinegar in a shallow saute pan or skillet:

Bring to a boil; slip the eggs in gently (the directions recommend using some sort of dish or cup to get the egg to the water without splashing it in).

Put a lid on the pan, remove it from the burner, wait 4 minutes or so, and voila! Poached eggs! I cooked min for 4 1/2 minutes and next time will try 5. Otherwise, I was quite happy with them.

To serve: remove them from the water with a slotted spoon, let them drain in the spoon a minute, and then place on the plate. I flipped them over as the bottom was a bit more presentable.

As a bonus, I had an "oh yeah I live in California" moment when I pulled a lemon from the tree out back to use as a garnish. Yum!

Photo Lottery

I learned about this blog-meme from Shopaholly:

1. Open the first (oldest) photo folder in your computer library
2. Scroll to the 10th photo
3. Post the photo and the story behind it

Right now I only have access to my Flickr photo stream, which I started in the summer of 2006, just before I moved from Oregon to California. Here is the photo that was the tenth one added to my photostream:

I was driving from Portland to Richland, Washington, to visit my old boss before I moved away (which sounds odd, but seemed like the thing to do at the time - she was super awesome, and it was a good excuse to see a different part of the region before I left). The country is gorgeous, and I drove along the mighty Columbia River for much of it.

It was a four-hour drive, which drives home how freaking huge this country is:

It also makes me realize what an upgrade it was to go from that old camera to my newer one!

Update on the garden project

I successfully germinated some tomato seeds:

and already have a brave sprout!!!!!!!!!!!

exploring East Bay parks!

I have two friends in town:

They are currently napping on my couch after a busy day of sunshine and fresh air, exploring two of the many parks in the East Bay!

One had a labyrinth:

With treasures at its center:

The other was near the Port of Oakland:

Both had sunshine, fresh air, flowers, and not that many other people!

 

Edited to add: Go read Joe's account of our day! His includes a link to a zoomed-in Google map of the area, and a bit of information about the labyrinth, which was created in 1990.