Raspberries

When L gets mad she makes raspberries. It's hilarious!

Here she wants her hay.

Turn up the sound!
I really wish I could get her to do that on command. But she only does it when she's mad.

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Speaking of raspberries. Stuff some chocolate chips inside fresh raspberries sometime. They're a great treat.

Bison

Up until last night I would have said these salmon fish sticks were the best thing I've had to eat this year. They're delicious. Loving salmon and growing up on Mrs Paul's, finding salmon inside my fish stick is crazy good.

I surf the web looking for recipes all the time. I try to have something new every week. Which is easy enough when you first start playing that game but becomes more challenging as time passes. I came across a grilled bison steak recipe that set the wheels turning. I've had bison but it was so long ago I don't remember whether I liked it or not. I've seen it at the local supermarket but the thought just never occurred to me to buy it.

Because bison has almost no fat it cooks quickly and overcooks easily. You want to sear it but you want less heat than you'd use for beef. These bison medallions are pretty widely available so that's what I decided I'd have.

I marinated my bison medallion (basically it's a loin section) in a chimichurri all day, dried it, seasoned it, skewered it and put it under a broiler suspended across a cast iron pan. Like this:

Skewered, under a broiler, over a cast iron pan
I expected it would be about 3 minutes each side. I probably should have preheated my broiler longer. Ended up taking 6 or 7 minutes each side.

Hands down the *best* thing I've had to eat this year
It was moist and flavorful. A little bit chewy. I like chewy. I was never a fan of really tender beef. Those are little red potatoes roasted in duck fat alongside and chimichurri spooned over the top.

I had a French Pinot Noir with it
I think a Cabernet Sauvignon would have been just fine and I read somewhere that the Presidential Inaugural Luncheon's second course served a California Merlot.

Time flies...

This year seems to have gone by very quickly. I was shopping for some holiday beer. I really felt as though I was doing the same thing just the other day and I realized - no, that was last year! Last year I got some Goose Island Christmas Ale and while I wasn't crazy about it I thought it was pretty good. I felt it was a little expensive for what it was.

What I was actually looking for was Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale. I look forward to Celebration Ale every year. I think it's excellent beer. In all my life I've only tasted a couple of beers I didn't like. Mostly I just like some more than others. As an adult I discovered I like ales and I tend to favor pale ales although this time of year I like lagers now and then. They didn't have any Celebration Ale!

So I got:

And I like it a lot. I'm becoming increasingly fond of canned beer. There's all kinds of really good beer in cans out there and I really had no idea.

I should do a year in review. Highlights. Lowlights. New things. I have so much on my mind these days I hardly know where to begin.

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Between the solar power plant a half mile away...

And this business with the neighbors...

One sign isn't enough? And I still wonder what's up with this?

The world seems like it's changed more this year than it has in years past.

New Kitty!

People think farms are great places for cats. So now and then we get "drop offs". People abandon their cat in the driveway. I'm sure with the hope expectation he or she will find a good home on the farm.

While there's a certain logic to that there are plenty of cats already in the barn and we just hand them off to the local shelter or we try to find good homes for them ourselves.

Somebody dropped this guy off a week or so ago.

He's very very sweet. And he's smart. My house needs a cat. I brought him home.

...and he made himself right at home
He's a jumper. He jumped up on the counter while I was fixing dinner and sent a bowl of olives flying. Before I could gather them up he was chowing down on them fast as he could find them. Purring to beat the band. So I named him Oliver.

It's been a long time since I've had a kitten around the house. I'm gonna guess this guy is maybe 10 months old. We'll visit the vet this week.

Edit, 10 November, followup: It's really interesting I think the vet says it's quite common for tuxedo cats to have that very sweet temperament. I never knew that.

Lucky for me he tires easily!

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I don't normally eat breakfast. A few years ago I started eating breakfast on Sunday mornings. Just to make Sunday morning special. And sometimes it's extra special.

Fresh duck eggs! Fresh squeezed orange juice. The egg in the cup had a double yolk!
Kindly provided by my friends next door. These guys.

They're very funny
If you don't know your way around a duck egg start with scrambled duck eggs. The yolks may be a little richer than chicken eggs but the biggest difference is the white. Duck egg whites are *very* much thicker than chicken egg whites and frying them is a little tricky. You're likely to overcook the yolk while the white will still be a little runny.

Taking my inspiration from McDonald's I decided I'd have a breakfast burrito.

Scrambled duck egg breakfast burrito with roasted peppers and mushrooms

Ten Years?

Ten years! It's been 10 years today.

Happy anniversary Sweety!

She's a lot prettier than I am don't you think?

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Then I come home to ..um...well done roast beef anyone? This wasn't a false alarm this time! Apparently a neighbor left the house with a roast in the oven. Either they just plain forgot or things just didn't go as planned. We have sprinklers. Thankfully nobody was hurt.

I think there should be a law that says everyone should have sprinklers...

But is it art?

I was thinking about this at length yesterday when I was running.

Is this "art"?

"Tomatoes"
That's an HDR image I made from a series of photographs I took last August.

Here. This is the basic photo of the image depicted above:

Is this art?
Of course, the work of Ansel Adams is art. He could create a masterpiece with a Brownie camera. He could and he did. Proving, by the way, it has nothing to do with equipment. Of course photography is "art". I never gave it much thought. Photographs hang in galleries. Framed photographs cover the walls of our homes and offices.

But when really, does a "snapshot" become a "work of art"?

Back in the day I had "mastered the medium" (at least I thought I did!). I used all kinds of different films for different reasons. I used one kind of film for portraits. Another for landscapes. Another for documentary work. I used technique and style to direct attention to what it was I saw. I'd use different chemical treatments and procedures (I had a darkroom too...) and papers and filters and, oh, all kinds of tools and techniques and there was never a shred of doubt in my mind; I was doing "art".

I don't know why it is I find digital photography so much different from chemical photography. It is for sure very different. Oh I think photographic film is a far superior medium than digital sensors and I can write a paper on that. But more than that, I sometimes wonder, as I tweak an image's color balance in Photoshop (aka "'shopping"), what's so different about that than say, using a filter while printing an image on paper?

I still haven't quite figured it out. I just don't feel like an artist when I'm using Photoshop. The passion and the extent of engagement is just so much different.

So. To answer my own question? Ya, I suppose it's art. But it's not as clear as I'd like.

Not in my backyard?

We have green neighbors where I board. I'm mostly all for it. I've been there a long time and I've enjoyed good relations with the neighbors. Then last year, right about this time of year as a matter of fact, POSTED signs went up all over the property. Complete with fine print noting "all previous permissions to be on the property are withdrawn". And we haven't exchanged a word since. In fact, I haven't seen anyone to have word with. Rumor has it "the management changed".

Which is something of shame. L and I have enjoyed countless hours on that very idyllic property. It's a large property and the signs number in the hundreds.

Now about this green thing. There. See the windmill? That's a $650k wind powered generator they run the property with. We'll never run out of wind! And all in all it's ...pretty harmless. An eyesore, sure, but no more than say, all the utility poles we've grown accustomed to seeing all the time. There, see them there on the left? They're ugly and we don't even see them anymore. And yes, it does make a "whoosh whoosh" sound you can hear almost a mile away when the wind is right. But it's really hard to argue against it being a good thing and it's much to their credit they're powering their property with it.

In the foreground to the right is a lovely 34 acre pasture. It's been used for hay and vegetables over time and it's another one of those country life things I enjoy so much. I run out here sometimes and I just love those hot summer days with crickets in the grass. The fields and orchards go for miles.

And here, looking from the other side. Yes, there's an excavator out there. Thankfully no, they're not building 100 houses out there!

5 May 2013 What they are building however...is a solar power station.

31 May 2013
A $15M solar power station. Of course it really is none of my business. But solar power plants aren't any prettier than any other kind of power plants.

4 July 2013

34 acres of these
There is good news! Remember, we haven't been talking much with the neighbors lately. So we didn't know exactly where this power plant was going to be built. There were rumors and vague descriptions which...

Described this field perfectly
Which is adjacent to our barn. See that red roof at the end of the treeline? Thankfully they did *not* put it there! I had been a little anxious about that.