Nothing says summer like outdoor adventures

Seriously, who's been interested in indoor sports like blogging? Not us. We've been busy

Attending beekeeping talks in West Philly:


(Did you know that harmful hive-mites get helplessly lost just a few inches away from the comb? The strategy is to overcome the problem by cross-breeding all species of bees to carry the mites outdoors and dump them.)

Enjoying birthday injera at our favorite Ethiopian restaurant:



Swimming in the Wissahickon with a friend:


Installing a green wall on Drexel's campus (guess which one of us did this):


Finding eggy evidence of happy vermicomposting worms:


Digging potatoes from the garden:


Making hot-weather suppers of delicious open-faced sandwiches and cold potato & bean salad:


Enjoying no less than 25 independent neighborhood fireworks shows from the roof of our house on the 4th:

(Why brave the crowds at the Art Museum when fireworks shows surround you?)

We've also been doing the usual berry picking, gardening, reading, cooking, and spending time with friends. And here's to more of the same.

So whatever happened to those strawberries?

Some of them ended up here:

This is our first attempt ever at making ice cream, and I was sold on making it because the recipe didn't require an ice-cream maker. Or rock salt.

Since it's delicious -- especially with homemade rhubarb pie -- I highly recommend that you try the recipe (found of course in Simply in Season).

Strawberry Ice Cream
2-3 c. strawberries, mashed
2 c. whipping cream, whipped to soft peaks
1 1/4 c. sweetened condensed milk
1 c. cold water
6 T. sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/4 tsp. salt

Chill all ingredients. In mixing bowl, beat all ingredients together with an electric mixer. Pour into a 9x13-inch pan and freeze until mushy, 3-4 hours. Remove from freezer and return to mixing bowl. Beat until smooth but not melted. Return to pan and freeze another 3 hours.

(Can substitute 6 peeled, crushed fresh peaches or blueberries for the strawberries and almond extract for the vanilla.)

Enjoy!

May review/June preview

 Sideyard = only place to be on long summer evenings.

 

  

"No time for cameras / we'll use our eyes instead"

Oh hey, blog...who would have thought that spending two weeks dog/house/garden-sitting for friends and starting a new job would throw things off so much?

So this is round one of what you missed: my little brother got married last weekend (!), and we traveled south to be a part of the fun and festivities. In the midst of rehearsal dinner preparations and wedding day merriment, we also managed to take advantage of Virginia's earlier strawberry season -- and of course eked out a little beach time (it's now tradition during family wedding weekends for the rest of us to pack up the dogs and a picnic and head to the water's edge).

I'm still having a hard time believing that my little brother is all grown up, let alone married, since he has been the ideal kid brother throughout most of my life. I mean, I guess he still is, but going home won't be the same without someone rigging up zip lines in the backyard or taking us out to a cornfield to shoot off rockets or teaching us the fine art of slingball. But here's to new adventures with a new sister-in-law!

 (our best impression of lawn ornaments)

The hills are still alive

This evening I got together with a few friends to watch/rediscover The Sound of Music, a film I saw probably hundreds of times as a child. (For a while we owned only three videos: TSoM, Mutiny on the Bounty, and Old Yeller. Romance, adventure, and tragedy really cover all the entertainment bases, right?) 

I made my first-ever apple strudel in honor of the occasion, and I do believe it turned out nicely:

Our timing was perfect, since the real-life Liesl, Agathe von Trapp, died only a few weeks ago at the age of 97. Here's to a legacy of gazebo dances, hiking over the Alps in light outerwear, and big musical finishes.

Procrastination

So, I'm supposed to be reading right now for my Urban Studies class at U.Penn, which has been a challenge for me. So much theoretical/philosophical/critical thinking is verging on the limits of my brain power. The rest of the class is filled with Penn prodigies who can talk endlessly about the Marx dialectic of the fetishization of commodities. The other hard thing is that we're sitting in a classroom filled with relatively wealthy individuals and we're talking about the working class like we (collectively) are all on one big team. Somehow I miss the connection between most of the class and their socio-economic background compared to that of the rest of Philadelphia.
I'll get off of that track before I offend anyone.

So yesterday I had several first time events. First, I bought coffee from the corner store. Nice to know that's available. Second, I went to a class through Greensgrow on fermentation where we made sauerkraut, pickles and mead. Third, I went to the new South St. bridge which is now open and there was a pre-opening (to cars) free time for anyone to walk/bike around. Fourth, I had a Vietnamese hoagie. So good. Then my amazing day ending with the neighbor complaining about my campfire in the yard, so I retreated indoors to read/procrastinate reading for the rest of the night, which has continued on to this morning.

Here are some pics, didn't remember to check my ISO before I started snapping photos, so they're kind of grainy. Lesson learned.

Stuffing sauerkraut into jars and prepping mead in the background.

Ya Philly, new bridge for all the Penn folk, I'm sure a lot of people are happy about this. I almost never go this far south and need to go to W. Philly so not that big of a deal in my daily life, but, if it's good for Philly, it's good for me, somehow.

The best part was that the Bicycle Coalition invited people to play bridge on the bridge, here they are doing their thing.


Now that 12 noon will soon be upon me, I really should start reading for class. 100 pages and 12 hours until midnight is only 8 pages an hour (eek!) better get started that sounds like a lot of reading. The book, by the way is by Alex Callinicos, Social Theory.

As seen in Music City

The list of things I really, really like about Nashville is short but steadily growing. In the past week or so, I've  discovered that

- late summer squash makes a delicious tart;

- every month Nashville hosts one of the largest flea markets in the country (!);

- sometimes neighbors make strange bedfellows;

- playing the spoons at a full-moon bluegrass pickin' party is a great way to spend a Friday evening (especially when you get a discounted admission for being a "musician"!);

- wearing pink tights and two dresses is a reasonable, rational thing to wear out of the house;

- sometimes winning doesn't necessarily mean you're the tastiest;

- the Country Music Hall of Fame has nice wood floors (more on the CMHF soon);

- and the weather is ideal for hanging out on campus.

 If this keeps up, I think it will be a good two years.

Weekend in the...city?

Yes, we've gone agricultural again, what with all the blueberry picking in New Jersey...

 And the hours of labor in the side yard:  

(Yes, that is a bag of trash, but hey! It's bagged up!)

I should have taken photos before we got started, because then you'd be super-impressed at the amount of work that went into getting the side yard to this point. It may not look like much more than a trash garden to you, but at least now we can see what's happening and make a real plan.

I was going to say we cheated a little and got a few starter plants, but a.) it's almost July already, so we needed to get a move on; and b.) we also planted seeds.  

I have to move to Nashville in just about seven (short) weeks, but I was thinking that if my Philadelphia legacy is a sprightly little garden and a freezer packed with blueberries, that's really not so bad. Not bad at all.