One more thing to love about Wisconsin...

Got stuck behind this on the way home from the Kickapoo Country Fair the other weekend.

The can-can

Home food preservation. What ehs it ohl about? (Okay, switch out of Ali G voice.)

Since I moved here and got accustomed to the crazy growing season followed by months of, um, not-growing, I've been saying I should can stuff but have never followed through. But this summer, this year really, is all about follow-through. It's also all about Patrick and me completing projects together. We already bought, cleaned, sliced and frozen 2 gallons of strawberries, and prepared and frozen more cream-of-broccoli soup that I care to think about. Not to mention PestoFest '09, which could happen any week. I've jumped on the Patrick train and he's jumped on the Alex train, and that train is going through some home food preservation territory.

My writing is feeling really gimmicky right now, but it's too late turn back. I apologize. The point is, I just got my 5-piece home canning kit in the mail (including jar lifter, magnetic lid lifter, tongs, funnel, and jar wrench), as well as my copy of the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. And you better believe I am ready to can some chipotle tomatillo salsa, some cherry pie filling, and some dilly beans. So if you come visit me this winter I'll still have the taste of summer waiting for you. I am, as the Ball cookbook puts it, "Preserving the Good Things in Life Because You Can!" But who knew this whole endeavor would be so loaded with puns?

The babes of summer

There's a baby bunny living in our yard. Actually there's probably several sibling baby bunnies living in our yard, but I think of them all as one. It likes to sit in the lawn and eat clover one stem at a time. If you enter the backyard slowly and quietly enough it will keep eating for a while, watching you nervously, before dashing back into the tall weeds. I'm afraid it will grow up and not be cute anymore before I manage to a picture of it, so I went looking for a picture online that looks like it. This is the closest I got, but our baby bunny is much cuter:

If this is Wednesday, I'm bunching radishes.

Hi everyone. Isn't the internet weird? One day I stop writing in my blog, or rather, I put off writing in my blog so long that nearly a year goes by, and yet here it is, waiting like a cat at a window. Maybe you've come by and looked at it. Probably you've given up on it. I more or less did.

But then in the last few months I've been thinking about it again. Other people I like kept blogging, or started, or started again. I decided to go look at ye olde blogge, and saw that one of my last entries was about ramps. And...holy passage of time! It's ramp season again here! Actually, it's past that. It's past asparagus season, and breezing by rhubarb straight in to lettuce, turnips, and garlic scapes. Where have I been?

I'll get to that. I just wanted to get your attention. I'm back.

Beer and antelope

I don't know if I've written before about Patrick's adviser, Volker, and his wife Anna. They are one of those power couples of academia, basically running Volker's lab together. Anna specializes in ornithology, Volker in forest ecology. They are warm, welcoming people, so much so that all sorts of significant-others like myself end up getting involved in lab events.

They are also avid hunters, their freezer well-stocked with game meat. In fact Anna only eats hunted meat out of distaste for the cruelty of feedlots and many slaughterhouses. Volker is the one who, when Patrick got his rifle, took us to the range to help site it in, and when Patick got his doe last fall we brought the carcass to Volker and Anna's place, where Volker hung it up in the barn and showed how to butcher it with little more than a pocket knife.

It's the time of year when some students have gotten their degrees and are moving on to new lives in different places, so Volker and Anna planned a send-off party. The whole point of this post being that I got an email invitation to a gathering at their house, with the instructions to bring "something that will go with beer and antelope."

It made me laugh, and it made me really grateful for the community I've fallen in with here, a social group in which ecologists invite me over for beer and antelope. And it also made me wonder...what goes with antelope?

A whole new pie world

Yesterday I discovered something new about myself: I can bake a pretty damn good pie. When you've been living for years under the assumption that baking pies is just something you can't do, this discovery is rather thrilling. Not to mention an important social skill here in Madison, where over the last year it has seemed like all the cool kids are baking pies--one of my friends has already stepped up the competition by including locally produced, pasture-raised lard in his crust. That's right, we're bringing lard back.

This was a cherry-strawberry-rhubarb pie, a combination suggested by the farmer who sold me all three ingredients. I have to give him credit for a great marketing scheme. Invite impressionable young shoppers to taste a sour cherry, then, while their minds are still blown from overpowering sourness and cherry flavor, drop the idea that they should bake the best sounding pie ever, slyly presenting the other ingredients they need. I wouldn't be surprised if he had an agreement with the kitchen-wares shop downtown, where I had to go immediately to get a pie dish.

And now I will go back to baking my thesis. I mean writing my thesis.

The Birds

I've been meaning to post about a number of things, including Springtime and my newfound success in sourdough bread, but in the meantime here are some pictures from our bird-banding adventure last weekend. Patrick is on a mission to see more birds these days, as his labmates are all competing for most species seen in WI in 2008. From our second story window he has identified a handful of different kinds of warblers, nuthatches, chickadees, and today a scarlet tanager. Bird banding near Baraboo him the opportunity to see more species, and gave me the opportunity to oggle some birds, enjoy a beautiful spring morning and all the meadow wildflowers, and eat the rhubarb pie someone brought for lunch. We also heard a ruffed grouse drumming, a first for me.