Microwave Applesauce

 

So, I am crazy about apples, eat one almost every day, as long as I can get good ones.

The boss is not a fan, but he likes applesauce and needs to eat foods like that. Thus over the years I have made him a lot of it.

My previous method of prep required hours of simmering. Turned out delicious and all, but I don't always want to spend half a day checking in every few minutes to stir, stir, stir.

Plus, since it was a PIA to make, I made a lot at once, and always ended up tossing some, even if I broke it into batches and froze. He just couldn't eat it fast enough.

As apple season winds down we've been visiting Bellinger's Orchard early and often to stock up. We bought some seconds last week (which are actually perfectly nice apples, with just a few blemishes). I knew it was inevitable that I spend a few boiling hours to care for my life partner.

Then I had a thought. I wondered if you could microwave applesauce in small batches quickly.

Turns out you can.

I am not sure what might work for you, but I peeled, cored, and diced two apples, and put them in a microwave safe bowl with enough water to keep them from drying out or burning up. Then I nuked them for five minutes, smushed them down a bit with a fork, gave them another minute and a half and there it was....enough lovely applesauce for a couple of day's meals.

I make it without sugar and just squash it up good but I guess you could blend it finer if you wish. We prefer it kind of chunky. We also like cinnamon, so I add a hearty dose of that.

I am so excited about this....It's the little things.

Happy Halloween

 

Brave-ish Heart

 

Rusty Blackbird, one of the nice birds we found

I dug deep into my heart to find the blood of my Scottish ancestors,  hoping to gather the strength to be bold. Then we  consulted maps and bravely headed off to Scotia on Sunday. To those who might think this is a terrifying accomplishment, Scotia is about 26 miles from here, a little over half an hour's drive.

However, Scotia is dum, da, dum, dum....a CITY! The place we wanted to go in hot pursuit of the recently visiting Ross's Goose is in a CITY!!! park.

We set out as soon as we dropped Becky off for work, which I quickly discovered, via actually reading the time stamps on the eBird lists featuring the bird, was a mistake.

See, the goose had been being seen in the afternoon and it was morning. Oh, well, I didn't notice until we were well on the way so we went anyhow. Turned out it was an easy drive, we found the place quickly, it was calm and pleasantly quiet, and well....really pretty nice. Didn't feel like a city at all.

The terrifying cityscape at Quinlan Park where the goose was visiting

Before I had been out of the car for even five minutes, I heard a strange sounding goose flying overhead. I knew it was something different than the normal Canada Geese. Merlin said Cackling Goose and so did its appearance, small, short neck, almost invisible bill. 

Cool, a rare bird. Before we left I had seen 23 species, including some other fairly unusual birds.

Alas, no Ross's Goose.

However, later in the day a prominent birder, who is also a really nice guy, posted that the goose was at the park. The boss said, "Let's go!" and so we did.

End result, another life bird, number 266, which doesn't make me big year material, but makes me pretty happy anyhow. Also two rare bird alert birds in one day. Downright cool.

Sometimes it's good to strike out boldly where no man.... dozens of other birders, have gone before. 

The best of my abysmal Ross's Goose photos.

Rustlers

 Most of the leaves are down here now. At early dog walking time the few that cling, bitter in the branches, make their presence known.

They rattle and hiss and sing their songs of late and lost and make the chill wind colder.

Orion is modest this cool fall dawn. A kilt of clouds is snug around his middle and a shawl draped mistily across his shield and shoulder. I appreciate his concern for my delicate sensibilities, but no matter what he wears, winter is still coming. I blame him for that...

But maybe he's just cold.

Some day I want to get some Winterberry Holly
for the yard. Meanwhile the swamps are ablaze with it

It has been one of the most beautiful Autumns in recent memory, taking me back to elementary school over in Fonda, (county offices now), where we played under the shedding maples, building forts and outlining "houses" with piles of leaves. Even then I was nobody's girly-girl, preferring that my golden enclosures be imaginary horse stables and corrals. 

No bright maples up here on the hill and I miss them. When we lived in town, I used to coax the village workers into bringing me the bags of leaves folks set out for pickup. I would dump them all inside my little fenced in garden down there and in spring rake them off the beds into the paths. In the few years we lived there the soil went from ashes and clinkers brought in as fill, hard as concrete and about as fertile, to rich, black earth that grew fine flowers and vegetables....alas, it is but a lawn now. Up here the soil is absurdly fertile, as evidenced by cannas that grow feet above my head every summer with minimal care.

Anyhow, we are still digging cannas...ugh, what a job!!! and dragging them indoors for winter. I have forced myself to leave a few summer hanging plants outside to freeze. It about kills me to let them go, but I KNOW they will not winter. Instead they will set up little aphid nurseries and infest all the other plants, so into the frostfire it is for them. I still feel guilty.

Ruddy Duck

Meanwhile birding has been sporadic at best and downright boring at worst. I blame the great weather. Why fly south when you can feast up here, fattening up for a slightly delayed escape later? Best recent bird has been a recurring Ruddy Duck up in the Lyker's area. I do love me a Ruddy Duck.

 These days, I am trying to rustle up the nerve to go chase the Ross's Goose in Collins Lake. It's only in Scotia for Pete's sake! Why am I so timid about going down there? Why am I so timid in general?

Dagnabbit.

However

 

Common Mergansers when it wasn't foggy

Despite the unrelenting daily fog, which makes chasing migrating ducks and geese problematic at best, there are compensations.

Jingling White-throated Sparrows make a tambourine of song from the thickets near the house. There are a lot of them this year. I have counted upwards of thirty around the yard, but there are more.

The sun turns the fog pink and gold and makes it pretty with the trees all ink and outline on the lawn.

So, I guess we will wait til the fog burns off and instead of chasing ducks I will see what's in the yard this morning.

I saw him
He didn't see me

Crickets

 

5AM dog walk.

Stars are crisp and bright. Nothing mars the dark and silent night. Crickets stopped their drilling four nights ago now and it is freezing every morning, though the days are soft and warm.

I walk my steps and watch the sun dip a hesitant toe in morning.

Tentative.

Cautious.

Is the ether warm or cold?

And with each single lumen come the fog drops from the sky.

Which flat wrecks the birding I can tell you! You cannot see a distant duck in a close-knit fog mull unless you have X-ray vision and I don't.

Oh, well, maybe some morning we will miss the fog....only the crickets know.

Recipe for Matthew

 

These pies were made with turkey Ralph bought me last Thanksgiving
It was still okay after being frozen for a year, but not as juicy and tasty as it might have been.
Made great pies though!

As requested:

Poultry Pies

Sauté 4 stalks of celery and two large cloves of garlic in oil of your choice. I use butter because…butter! It’s better!

When celery is somewhere near done add 4 or 5 chicken thighs, or maybe four cups or so of cut up leftover Thanksgiving turkey.

Season to taste. I use generous amounts of lemon pepper blend, Italian seasoning, Mrs. Dash seasoning, a tiny dusting of onion powder, and same of sage. Also half a teaspoon of our homemade paprika. You can use whatever you like. Since we don’t add salt, we are not afraid to toss in a bunch of flavorings.

I cook the thighs until they are mostly done, then use scissors to cut them into comfortably bite-sized pieces and finish cooking them through.

Taste a bit. Add more seasonings if needed.

While this is going on I prepare the vegetables. This is another place where personal taste comes in. Generally I prepare two packages of steam in the bag California blend and add them when most of the other ingredients are cooked. However, sometimes we add cooked  peas, frozen or canned, fresh carrots if we have them, fresh broccoli if there happens to be some in the fridge. Pretty much anything will blend nicely. I’d like to try some turnips or rutabagas. Leftovers are good...

Add the veggies and a couple/three cans of cream of mushroom soup. We buy no-salt-added if we can find it, but regular works too. Heat it all up together and taste again. Add seasonings if needed. By this point it should taste really good.

Divide the stuff into two pie crusts, 10 inch I think, cover it with another crust, crimp and pierce as needed and bake until the crust is good and brown in a 350 degree oven.

One pie feeds three of us two hearty meals and you could stretch it to feed two meals to four people if you needed to, but I have to warn you. It is really tasty and you might not want to share.

I usually cover the extra pie with tight foil and freeze for the next time we want it. 

You could easily adapt this recipe to beef, pork or venison. I love having  a nice pie waiting for a cold night when we are all hungry and nobody wants to cook. We really like them a lot.

Final Harvest

 

The forecast is for 29 degrees tomorrow night, the end of our growing season here. Thus the last tender things must be brought inside or their loss accepted. The fuchsia will be left out. I have never succeeded in wintering one so... Ditto the toothache plant, a first for me this year. I saved some seed and may harvest a bit more, but it's gonna be a goner. An ugly thing, but a fun novelty this year.

Lion's Ear...Many thanks to the nice lady who sent me seeds

The cannas are let to freeze, trimmed back to the ground, dug, and stored in totes and buckets in the pantry until spring. The potted ones I just haul in pots and all. I do try to winter the minis as house plants. They are kind of a pain to care for but I don't want to lose them. I saved seed from some of my favorites last year and they made it to bloom pretty early this summer, so I have been saving lots of seeds this year.

One miserable job is finding all the green tomatoes and stashing them somewhere indoors. For some reason tomato ripening was terribly sporadic this year and there are lots of green ones. There are also a number of bright red Alma peppers that need to come in to be dried for paprika. More on that in a later post that I have so far been too lazy to write.

Then begins the long cold. I recently read Alaska Challenge by Ruth and Bill Albee and Lyman Anson. It was written in 1930 about their insane adventure traveling across British Columbia following an uncharted path through the wildest of wilderness. It made me feel like a puppy, whining about modern NY winters, but still... BTW, it was quite a book. Becky got it for me as an audio book and at first i was so aggravated by the foolish things the Albees did that I almost DNFed it. However, as they got smarter, it got better, until I simply hated to see it end. If anyone knows of any websites detailing their later lives, I hope you will share. I am really curious to know what became of them and their Artic born children.

Anyhow, summer's over, the fun part of fall, ditto. And all I can say is BRRRR....

So the Wind Decided

That Saturday was the day to tear down the garden pond water feature and pull out the plants.

Well, actually it did a lot of the work for me, if not in exactly the manner I would have chosen. I had taken out the pump the day before and left it on the lawn to dry. That drained the two metal containers Alan had fashioned into a clever fountain, and made them much lighter than before.

Combined with the gigantic canna lily leaves from the corms therein it made a sort of sail. Not only were the bucket jobbies and the plants, plus adjacent plants as well, dumped into the center of the pond, all the cement props for same were also tumbled in.

I was glad it was pretty warm, as I shoved my sleeves up to my elbows and guddled around in the pond for a while, dragging out all the trappings, in between birding for October Big Day. 

I was astonished at how clean and light the cannas that had been in the buckets all summer ended up. They were huge! Feet over my head and lush, dark green, and vigorous looking. Yet the root system was neat and clean,

I was delighted that my little experiment turned out so well. As I was finishing up planting cannas last spring, as always there were a bunch left over. They multiply like bunnies or rocket scientists with fast calculators. On a whim I dropped a few into the water feature, into which water is pumped all summer to create a jingling cascade into the pond.

(Birds are drawn to the sound of moving water and guess who loves birds.)

Anyhow the thing succeeded like a champ. Not only did the plants grow eagerly, indeed madly, like a tropical forest, but the pond was the cleanest I have ever seen it. Despite grackles bombing it all summer with fecal sacs from their noisy offspring, which is usually a horrific problem, the water was crystal clear. We could enjoy the goldfish and rosy minnows all through the warm months, and once the cannas got growing, string algae ceased to be a problem.

The current water feature is pretty beat up from pond life for the past couple of years, but I have all sorts of ideas for doing something similar next year. I mean seriously! From changing the filter almost every day, with string algae nearly filling the pond every week, to changing the filter TWICE!!!! all summer!!! and it was still clean and clear when I pulled the pump!'

Also I didn't have to buy fancy water lettuce  and then clean that mess up in the fall either, and I have tons of cannas every year.

I can't wait for next spring! I am going to have a lot of fun with it all.

Maine Birds

Great Black-backed Gull

 I don't think one post is going to be enough. 

Sanderling with clam on the half shell

Here in Montgomery County I have never seen a Sanderling, although they have been encountered here historically. On the beaches of Maine I saw hundreds upon hundreds, scuttling through the wrack hunting for tiny morsels of food, assorted invertebrates of which there must have been millions. These little cuties nest in the high arctic tundra, but during migration they disperse to sandy beaches all over the world. They are the birds you often see at the edge of the waves, racing in and out with the water, grabbing tasty treats. They are one of my favorite sandpipers.

Semi-palmated Sandpipers

There were equal numbers of Semi-palmated Sandpipers, interspersed with the Sanderlings. (I found one of those at the Schoharie Crossing boat launch this year.)  Shorebirds are challenging to identify to say the least, and I use What's This Bird pretty often. However, semi-palmated means that they have partial webbing between their toes and Sanderlings lack a hind toe altogether, so if they roll over and wave their feet at you, you can easily separate them. Alas not one of them did that, although I did get some pics of Sanderlings with the toe...or lack of one...visible.

Semi-palmated Plover, just for confusion's sake

His little semi-palmated feet

Beach covered with wrack, invasive Asian seaweed
Birds loved it
But ugh!

Cute little Ring-billed Gull

Then there were the gulls, OMG the gulls. There wasn't a single species that isn't common right here in Fultonville in Winter, but hereabouts they don't let you walk up three feet away to take pictures. The larus group in general has a terrible and well-deserved reputation for being pretty awful, but boy, did I have fun with them. Photos of their squabbles and cosmopolitan dietary inclinations beg to be captioned, ferocious clowns that they are. If birds were once dinosaurs gulls aren't far from their ancestors.

Herring Gulls having a kerfuffle 

Best bird of the week, or birds if you prefer, was a pair of American Golden Plovers. After a lifetime of birding "lifers" are scarce and exciting. These were what I consider to be "good" lifers, because they are birds that are very unlikely to show up here...as far as I can tell no one has ever seen one in Montgomery County.  I never saw one on my travels before eBird either, thus more special, than even a Cattle Egret would be, which I have seen right here on the farm, but before eBird. I was astonished to see them fly over and even get a recording of their calls.

A portion of the Parsons Beach area

More of Parson's Beach

Best place we found was Parson's Beach in the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge. It was a pretty busy place, so the birds were much disturbed, but there plenty of them there. That was where we saw the plovers. We didn't find the spot until Sunday and were heading out Monday, but Ralph and Becky were kind enough to indulge me with a second visit first thing Monday morning before we left for home.

Snowy Egret

Snowy Egret with Great Egret

Just as we were leaving I found another birder counting there...the only birder I met all weekend. It was nice to talk to her about the area. Just before that encounter two little white waders popped into some mud flats with a huge Great Egret. They were Snowy Egrets, birds I hadn't seen since Florida several years ago, and Maine lifers for me. I had been looking for them the whole trip, so they were a nice finish for me.

JSYK, of those 374 photos I took the vast majority were of birds, mostly of sandpipers and gulls. And acres of pinkish seaweed, which had washed ashore with the waves. Research says it is invasive Asian algae. There sure was a lot of it.

Common Eider Duck...and they were too, we saw 
hundreds

I miss Maine already and hope we can hold it together enough to go back next year. 

Huge thanks to Ralph and Becky for walking beaches with me until they got sick of it, then waiting in the car noodling on their phones while I walked some more.

*Travel tip for the parsimonious. I fill empty freezer space with gallon jugs of water to save electricity. We put two in our big cooler and the food and beverages we took along on Friday morning were still cold on Monday, although if we had stayed another day we would have had to buy ice. We just put them back in the freezer when we got home. No watery mess in the bottom of the cooler when they melted either.

Man feeding gulls at Nubble Light
Not me
No way
No how
Not ever.

Maine

 

A couple few years ago Alan took me to Maine. It was a great adventure, with a heavy emphasis on the latter word. I loved it.

Then more recently Scott and Jen and the girls took us to coastal Maine. Even more love. Toes in the ocean. Shorebirds. Exciting places. What's not to love?

Thus we decided on a DIY Maine mini vacation.

My dear brother got us an amazing hotel room with his points which made it even easier than we had planned. (Thanks, Matt and Lisa!) Think Eve Dallas shower...if you know you know...

The boss drove almost continuously from early Friday morning to yesterday afternoon. Mad props to him for doing a good job in a strange place, with a less than adequate navigator....just ask my birding buddies about that...For the most part until Sunday we met sensible, courteous drivers. Sunday was not that way.

We found a cool little independent chocolate shop, where we got Liz the taffy she requested. Becky found some really nice shirts at one place we stopped...wait until you see her! She looks amazing in them.

However, neither shopping, nor chocolate was the focus of the trip for me...I'll bet you can guess what my goal was...

Birds!

And we found them. More about that later. 

We saw staggering sunrises that defied description. I got my feet wet in the Atlantic, which is important to me for some reason. I watched more happy dogs at play than I ever imagined existed. Dogs of every size and description, cavorting and jostling with friends, chasing tennis balls down the beach or out into the water, eating and/or rolling in the most disgusting substances imaginable. It was a doggy paradise. I shuddered to think of the effort it was going to take to get them drawing room friendly again, but Lord, Lord, they were having fun. 

We greeted dozens upon dozens of friendly morning walkers, and exchanged multitudes of cheerful smiles.

It was nice. I love Maine.

We also had car trouble. Our much loved little Blazer decided it would be fun to start sharing electrical gremlins of assorted varieties. No heat, fans on all the time, no auto headlights. All problems were intermittent and refused to occur when we stopped at Sullivan Tire in Biddeford for help. Kudos to them btw. They spent a good deal of time and effort with us and didn't charge us a thing. Nice folks. 

As with all the best vacations it was wonderful, and yet oh, so good to be home. JSYK Ralph still snores.

A lot.

We love him anyhow. 

Many thanks to everyone who made it all possible.

PS, I took 374 pictures just with the camera, not to mention whatever ones I took with the phone. Now to spend some time weeding them out.