Pedro gave us the most beeeeautiful pumpkin in the whole world on the last day of selling.  Sadly, I didn’t get a picture of it.  But I did get a picture of the aftermath of cooking that sucker up. 

It’s interesting what a disconnect there is in America when it comes to pumpkins as food.  We carve pumpkins, we decorate with them, we even chuck them, but very few actually consider cooking them.  When a recipe calls for pumpkin puree, we automatically think of canned pumpkin.  It’s true that cooking a pumpkin is no small endeavor - this particular specimen took a good 4 or 5 hours - but man is it gratifying, and so worth it.  Because this guy was so big it was a bit challenging to cut, and then wouldn’t all fit in the oven so had to be baked in a few rounds.  Then we let it cool, scooped and scraped all the flesh into our new totally kick-ass food processor, and blended it up.  The result was 8 pint glasses and a bit.  We froze the puree in the pint glasses, and will then warm them up enough to slide the puree out into a freezer bag or container for storing.  (We chose pint glasses because they are roughly the same size as a can of pumpkin puree, which is what most recipes call for - 16 oz. vs 15 oz.)

What, you ask, do we make with all that punkin puree?  Well, for starters, to celebrate the fruits of our labors (literally), I tried out Marianne’s pumpkin martini recipe.  I do love a good martini, and this one was a winner.  Thanks Mom Schroeder!  Nate made a pumpkin carrot soup that was pretty awesome, and is as we speak in the process of trying out a new pumpkin bread recipe that we hope to serve up at Justin & Juliana’s shower on Sunday.  We are also planning on making some kind of pumpkin cookie, or bar, or pie, or cheesecake for the shower.  We actually have a cookbook devoted entirely to squash and pumpkins, so I don’t think we will run out of ideas! The seeds of this guy were also big and perfect and beautiful, and I cooked them up in the iron skillet with some oil, sea salt and cumin.  Yummy.

We’ve also had some new adventures in homemade pizza making, one of our faves. We made a pizza entirely from scratch a couple months ago - Nate made the crust, I made the sauce with tomatoes from our garden and CSA, we made the mozzarella, put veggies on it from our CSA, and venison sausage from a deer Peter shot at his grandma’s farm.  Whoa.

Then we stole an idea and a super easy slow roasted roma tomato recipe from the Kastlers and have now made our new  favorite pizza, with buffalo mozzarella and basil. Thank you, thank you, thank you Madeline for sharing this recipe, it has changed my life.  In fact, on the chance it will change yours too, I’ll put it below.

I had the intention of canning a whole mess of salsa, because we eatalotta salsa and this would be a good money saver, in addition to not going through all those jars.  But the recipes for canned salsa call for a ton of vinegar or lemon juice to  make sure it’s acidic enough to be safe, and after a couple of test batches, we decided the tang was too much.  So I ended up just making one large jar at a time that we’ve kept in our fridge and ate right away, and that’s kept us in salsa heaven for a few months straight!  Note to Karen’s Secret Santa: I want a pressure canner so I will be able to can salsa without all the vinegar or lemon juice! 

And the last thing I would like to discuss is all the usage I’ve been getting as of late from our dehydrator, handed down to us by Mom Phillips - thanks Ma!  Faithful readers may recall that earlier in the season I spent way too much time drying an insane amount of dill in the dehydrator.  I was kind of over the contraption for awhile after that. But lately I’ve been drying lots and lots of apples and cranberries and I’m kind of in love with the thing.  I can now reasonably declare that Honey Crisp apples are hands down, without a doubt, the greatest apples in the entire world.  It does not matter what you do with them - eat them raw, dry them, bake them, roast them with fall vegetables - they are astoundingly delicious every time.  I vow to one day buy them by the bushel and dry and can and whatever else I have to do to them so that I can eat them non-stop, year-round to my heart and tummy’s delight.  Ohhh Honey Crisp.

I’ve also been making craisins, which, as it turns out, is not as easy as just throwing a bunch of cranberries in the dehydrator.  Here’s the method I’ve been using:

1. Put the cranberries in a pot of boiling water so they pop (this allows the moisture to escape in the dehydrator).  Poke any that do not pop with the end of a knife.

2. Soak overnight in a bowl of orange juice mixed with honey or maple syrup.

3. Drain the cranberries, reserving the liquid, and spread them out on the racks of the dehydrator, then plug the thing in and let them dry for what seems like forever.  (You could also use an oven on low heat.)

4. Very important step: Make the reserved soaking juice into a martini using a 2:1 ratio of juice to vodka. Or mix it with soda water (and vodka) for a yummy sparkling juice (cocktail).

I made one pint of these (craisins, not cocktails) last week and have been eating them with granola and yogurt for breakfast.  They also added a perfect punch to a breakfast dish of cooked cracked barley, cream, and maple syrup that Nate made. I imagine they would be awesome on a salad with some goat or bleu cheese and walnuts and a nice vinaigrette.  Mmmm.  I have 3 pints currently drying which will hopefully last a few months.

And now we’re off on a round of errands to start getting ready for the shower tomorrow and get a certain wonderdog a birthday present - Seward co-op, Green Gifts Fair, Urbanimal!

Slow Roasted Roma Tomatoes a la Mad-dog

Prep a shallow baking pan with two tablespoons of olive oil.  

Cut tomatoes in half lengthwise and lay them cut side up in the pan.

Brush another tablespoon of olive oil over the cut side of the tomatoes and sprinkle with chopped garlic and herbs - rosemary, thyme, oregano, whatever you have.  

Put it in a 300 degree oven for 2 hours.  Voila!  

Use immediately on a pizza or in a pasta dish, or freeze and store.  Freeze them right in the pan and then put them in a baggie or container so they will be easier to separate when you want to use them.

 

As many of you know, my favorite TV show of all time is So You Think You Can Dance.  I’ve given it some thought, and I really can’t put my finger on why I love it so much.  I mean it’s not like I was ever a dancer and am fantasizing about what might have been.  And I’m not a big fan of American Idol (which would have made a whole lot more sense since I did once upon a time - uh, and maybe just this past weekend - sing), or Dancing With the Stars, or those other talent contest type reality shows. Anyway, there may not be a lot of logic behind it, but I so loooove it. I think I was a little embarrassed about it for awhile so I didn’t really talk about it, but at some point several of my lady friends and I realized we were all secretly watching it and obsessed with it. So then we started making ladies’ night out of it and getting together to watch it, thereby combining several favorite things into one: the best TV show of all time, my lady friends, and wine.

After the actual TV show is done and "America’s Favorite Dancer" is declared, the top 10 or so dancers go on a national tour.  Well.  Last year my lady friends and I talked about getting tickets to the live show, but by the time we got around to it the only tickets that were left were super crappy yet still expensive seats, so we decided against it.  This year lots of stuff sort of came up during the season and we were all pretty busy, so we kind of stopped getting together to watch it.  I ended up YouTubing most of it.  So we all kind of missed the boat on buying tickets for the live show.  And then came my birthday.  And I received the greatest present ever, 2 tickets to the live show!

My lady friends were all pretty jealous, and some (Peacock) tried to buy the 2nd ticket from Nate.  He was strangely silent about the whole thing, because he is secretly a total fan of the show but is too embarassed to admit it! 

The show was this past Sunday evening at the Xcel Center in downtown St. Paul.  We decided to have dinner at the nearby Great Waters Brewing Co., which was an experience in and of itself: the place was packed with ladies!  Mostly teenage girls, but also some tables of moms, and some tables of my-age ladies all getting their drink and dessert on, like we do.  And yes, they were ALL going to So You think You Can Dance!  Nate was feeling a bit out of place at this point, and trying even harder to look like he was just there to support me. 

Once we got to the Xcel, there were more dudes, but it was still definitely heavy on the ladies.  I told Nate not to judge me, but that I needed to buy some merchandise.  I had my heart set on a Super Twitch shirt, but alas, they had none, and the lines were too crazy long for me to check out the other goods. We made our way to our seats, only to find that they totally suuuucked!  As far back as could be, and as far in the corner as could be so that we were actually kind of behind the stage.  I still didn’t care, I was so psyched.  We had some time to kill, so we decided to walk around.  We ended up coming out again in a place directly facing the stage where there were these bar stool type seats.  These had a killer view, and a little table to stick our popcorn on. We figured we’d hang out there a while till we got kicked out.  But we never did!  We got to stay there the whole show!  YAY.  

And it was awesome.  They did almost all of my favorite numbers: the group Bollywood, the Russian boingy boingy one, the suitcase, the bed one, the door one, the garden, the frankenstein one, and so many more…  It was soooooo coooool.  And of course, my favorite dance of the season, and the reason I’ve had to start every day this week by blasting this song, Comfort and Twitch’s hip hop dance to "Forever":

Thank you Nate and any Schroeder siblings who played a part in this totally awesome birthday present!!!

I turned the big 31 yesterday!  I’m pretty happy about it actually.  I turned 30 and was pretty sure my entire body was falling apart, but I’m happy to report that at 31 I feel much more held together. 

I pondered several options for celebrating being so well held together.  Nate and I had been hoping to visit my brother in Ghana this October, and when we finally came to the difficult decision that we just couldn’t afford it, we decided instead to make this weekend our one big trip, celebrating not just my birthday but also the one year anniversary of our wedding!!

Nate and I stayed in a little cottage in Grand Marais, and took a class at the North House Folk School in identifying wild mushrooms!  We got to spend the day with Mr. Mushroom, Mike McCall, a fungus expert.  We started out in the classroom going over some boomer basics, then headed out to the Kadunce River section of the Superior Hiking Trail.  That alone was exciting for me - I’ve spent a lot of time on that trail, but had never been north of Grand Marais on it. 

In spite of how dry it had been, we were able to find lots of mushrooms!  Ready… go.  This here is one kind of fungus parasitizing another.  Whoa.  It is some kind of common russula, which normally looks like a regular white capped mushroom, that has been parasitized by a Lobster Hypomyces lactifluorem, which alters the shape and consistency of the original mushroom.  Mike told us that although it’s kind of nasty on it’s own, once it has been parasitized, it is pretty yummy to eat! 

This is a coral mushroom that Nate found!  Coooool.  But is it as cool as this slime mold that I found?  That’s right, I said slime mold!  The thing about mushrooms is that the part you see is just the fruiting body of a whole mess of stuff below the surface.  In the case of this slime mold, mycelia have been living inside that rotting log, and they just decided conditions were right to send out their… uh… slime wad.  the slime wad then traveled up, up, up as far as it could get on that log to give its spores the best chance of disseminating. So cool, and gross, all at the same time.

Nate was maybe most excited about the chanterelles Mike found, one of the yummiest of all wild mushrooms!  They supposedly have an apricot scent, but none of us really got that. 

We saw lots and lots of a couple kinds of mushrooms that like to grow on birch trees:the Piptoporus betulinus, or Birch polypore, and the Fomes fomentarius, or Tinder polypore.  I kind of flipped when I read in my guide book that the freaking Iceman had one of each of these kinds of fungi with him!  The first likely for its antibacterial properties, the second as part of a fire-starting kit (the innards can be used as tinder, or to hold a small flame for a long period of time).

After a couple hours of collecting, we took our spoils back to the classrooom to eat lunch while Mike officially IDed them, to talk more and ask lots of questions.  Mike dispelled a myth that I had thought to be true, that every edible mushroom has a poisonous look-alike.  He said that there are actually relatively few poisonous mushrooms, and that with even just a bit of training, you can tell at a glance whether a boomer is poisonous or not, with only one exception for this region.  I still feel kind of leery of the whole thing, but not Nate.  He hasn’t stopped mushroom hunting everywhere he’s been since the class, and even identified a mushroom growing in our backyard as soon as we got home, determined it was an edible ash bolete, and though the internets said it wouldn’t be that good, cooked it up and ate it anyway! 

After our class, we had an early dinner at one of my favorite restaurants anywhere, the Angry Trout.  Here was my awesome view:  handsome fella and beautiful, Lake Superior!  Here’s what we consumed: locally caught and smoked herring and lake trout, local cheese, fresh green beans, and blueberries, washed down with a Minnesota raspberry honeywine and a Lake Superior Oatmeal Stout. Mmm. 

We had stopped on our way up the shore at Betty’s Pies for a birthday pie.  I had been dreaming for days about a banana cream pie, but alas, when we got there, they only had a "French" banana cream pie, made with cream cheese instead of whipped cream.  Blasphemous.   So I was forced to settle for this toffee cream pie, which Nate and I devoured over the next 3 days! 

We had signed up to go sailing on the Folk School’s schooner Hjordis, but because of high winds the trip was canceled.  So instead I made Nate ride the Alpine Slide with me in Lutsen!  It turned out Nate was actually kind of scared of the alpine slide.  So on the incredibly long ski lift ride to the top of the "mountain", I comforted him by telling him how safe it was.  Just then, on the track below us - the slow track, mind you - a dad and his little boy came flying around the corner, flew off the track, flipped around in the air, and crashed horribly.  Those of us on the ski lift just gasped and stared, not being able to do anything, 20 feet above them in the air.  I was certain they were unconscious, if not dead.  But then the kid started wailing and screaming.  The dad managed to get him back on the sled and continue to the bottom of the hill, and we don’t know what happened then, because we were at the top of the hill, waiting in a long line - for the fast track no less! - for a chance to plummet to our own deaths!  I’m pretty sure Nate rode the brake the whole way down, and I started out that way… until this guy in the slow track started to pass me.  Then I opened her up. 

We also stopped at the Cascade Lodge to take a walk around and reminisce about the epic wedding we had there just one year ago.  We hiked around in the woods looking for mushrooms, and found these.  I was very excited to realize it was Indian Pipe, a very unique native plant I’ve been wanting to see!   It lacks chlorophyll, and gets nourishment from a beneficial relationship with mycorrhiza - fungus!

And finally, the true sign of a good fun and food-filled weekend: not being able to stay awake in the car on the ride home!

The bad news: We’ve been out here for 2.5 hours and only made $23.75.  And from the looks of this picture I may have just developed a lazy eye. 



The good news:  Free entertainment in the front yard in the form of an amazing Native American drumming and dancing ceremony!

Other good news: It’s almost noon, which means we can respectably start drinking beer. 

Ok so I wasn’t too lazy, and  I did do the cool thing I had planned on doing, which was go to the Biodome!  This place is an environmental museum with four distinct ecosystems:  a tropical rainforest, a Laurentian forest, a St. Lawrence marine ecosystem, and an arctic/antarctic ecosystem.  It is all inside this big dome building next to the Parc Olympique, and was previously used for Olympic cycling events.  Annette accompanied me again, and was extremely patient as I took in every single detail.  I warned her that I would probably take forever, and it was no joke - I think we were there for like 4 hours.

Here’s what we saw.  First was the tropical rainforest, and the creatures that stood out the most there were definitely the vast herds of screaming school children.  In addition to them, we saw this super cool spoonbill bird, which was hanging out with a capybara.  I had never heard of a capybara before, and it turns out they are the world’s largest rodent.  And yet somehow I still really liked him.  He was swimming back and forth, back and forth, so I wasn’t able to get a very good photo of him, bummer.  But check out these piranhas, eh?  There were lots and lots of birds (Rick and Jack, I’ll send you more pics later!) including some ducks and a scarlet ibis, some little black monkeys, some little orange monkeys, iguanas, caimans, bats, poison dart frogs, an anaconda, and more!  We couldn’t find the two-toed sloth though. 

Then it was on to the Laurentian forest, where there were a couple of river otters swimming and playing, a beaver dam that they had a camera inside of so you could see the little guy sleeping in there, more birds and ducks, two Canadian lynx, and a bunch of fish.  They also had some cool endangered plant projects going on, wild leeks and ginseng among them.  This photo is a couple of porcupines sleeping in a tree!  (PS, you weren’t supposed to use a flash, so that’s why a lot of these photos are sub-prime, sorry.)

The St. lawrence marine ecosystem had an aquarium part with lots of cool fish - did you know that flounder and halibut start out like other fish, and then as they get older they turn sideways and their one eye migrates around?  They end up flattened so they can lie on the bottom all camouflaged and have both their eyes looking up, and so they swim sideways.  Weird.  Annette and I were both deeply disturbed at the realization that Flounder from Little Mermaid was apparently not a flounder at all. 

Then you could go upstairs and see the above water part of this ecosystem, with all kinds of sea birds and a tidal pool.  The tidal pool was crazy and kind of creepy, all sorts of multi-colored gelatinous-looking things.  And get this.  A woman in New England won a giant lobster (8 kg - it’s claws were as big as my forearms!) at a bar in some kind of Super Bowl drawing this past February.  She couldn’t bear the thought of eating it, so she found it a home at the Biodome!  The birds in this part were really beautiful - common eiders, black guillemots, terns, and black-legged kittiwakes (yes, I did write those down so I could tell you Rick).

And last but not least, the arctic/antarctic.  Here you go Mom: penguins, penguins, penguins! It was interesting to read about how birds in the north and south poles share so many characteristics and yet are unrelated, because they evolved in similar environments.  For example, puffins and penguins have similar coloring, because when they are swimming, the black on their backs camouflages them from predators in the air and the white on their tummies camouflages them from predators below them in the water.  Cool stuff.  There were 4 kinds of penguins: gentoons, rockhoppers, macaronis, and king or emperors. They were wildly entertaining, and I could have sat there all day and watched them!  They also had a speaker broadcasting the noises of the penguins, and those crazy guys with the yellow tufts sure were a noisy bunch! 

Ok, enough about the Biodome already.   Nate and Brent had managed to get Annette and I in to their evening reception, which was held at the Museum of Fine Arts.  So we went, we schmoozed, we drank wine and ate lots of cheese.  Nate was still determined to go to his #1 brewpub of choice, but was convinced that it was too far away.  So we went to Brutopia, even though he had already been there for lunch that day.  I think the following photos sum up that experience nicely. 

As soon as Nate is done for the day today we are going to make yet another attempt to get to his #1 brewpub of choice, and hopefully we’ll beat the hockey game rush.  And tomorrow we say "Au revoir Canada!" and begin the long haul home!

And oh yeah - GO WILD!!!!!
  

I totally loved the show MacGyver when I was little and had a monster crush on him (along with then Milwaukee Brewer Paul Molitor and our local news anchor, Mike Gousha).  So I couldn’t be more delighted that I am now married to the real-life version! 

I had set up a work station upstairs for my masters project awhile ago, and last weekend I actually started working on it again (and there was much rejoicing among parents).  I still have a bunch of interviews to transcribe, and that’s a great way to start since I need to refresh myself on the work I did before I can work on my paper.  So I sat down to start transcribing, and the power on the transcriber wouldn’t go on.  It worked fine the last time I used it and has just been sitting there ever since, and I mean I know it’s been awhile but it’s not like it’s been years! Or… uh… not more than 2 years…  anyway… whatever.  So I realized the whole electric outlet wasn’t working, and neither were any of the outlets upstairs.  It wasn’t a fuse, so I was stumped.  Nate came to the rescue of course and fixed it (and I still don’t quite get it).  But the power light on the transcriber still wouldn’t go on.  Nate pulled out his magic power senser thingy and determined that it was the power cord.  So I said ok, I would go buy another one.  But he informed me that I would not likely be able to find one because he had never seen one with an end like that (looked like any old power cord to me…).  Ok.  So he found another cord that had the same voltage, cut them both in half and rewired them back together.  Whoa.  And then it worked.  But the transcriber has a speed control, so you can slow the tapes way down or speed them way up, and now, even the slowest level was pretty fast.  So then Nate took the freaking thing apart, adjusted it, and put it back together!  All is now well in the world of tape transcribing.  But if it weren’t for him, I would still be trying to figure out how to make the outlets work!

Then last night we decided to participate in Earth Hour.  While I was pulling out candles, Nate decided to make his own.  It’s the one on the right, and involves a little bit of vegetable oil in a bowl, and a wick made from paper towel stuffed into a piece of pipe.  Nate decided to take it further than just turning off our lights and turned off his computer… and then he got a little lost and confused about his place in the world. So he helped me make another batch of Bruno biscuits by candlelight, how romantic.

On a non-MacGyver note, yesterday we also took Bruno for a hike at Crosby Park, where I will soon be spending quite a bit of time.  We decided it would be a good time to start getting him used to his doggy backpack.  We just got a new, bigger tent and can’t wait to take him camping, but dog friend’s gonna have to carry his own food.  Well I’m happy to report that it went quite well.  We put a water bottle in one side and some potatoes in the other, just to balance it out.  He definitely seemed a little extra tired afterwards, but I think he kind of liked having a job. 

And I leave you with a little old school MacGyver.  So dreamy… though I have to say, I selfishly prefer that my MacGyver’s mad skills are applied to household tasks rather than life-threatening confrontations with terrorists and corporate bad guys!