More Lindsey Stirling...

Pretty awesome what you can do not only with a violin, but with relatively affordable video cameras & some training these days:

Mac 'n Cheese

Don't make it too often, but it's getting to be pretty easy now that I'm in the swing of making a lot more of my meals.

Also first time I've made it since I bought several of these toaster-oven sized stoneware dishes (got them in ovals too.) Hope there's not too much lead in the Chinese glazing :D





That's good enough for two, or I really should stretch it three, meals. Plus that's only half the mix; the other half I froze (we'll see how that turns out) to bake on a future day -- I think all I need to do is defrost, breadcrumb it, and bake.

Think I need new plates...

At least for the photos :D

And I swear to God I checked the blue one to make sure it wasn't the one I had chipped on Sunday...am I blind?

Ham Steak from Campbell's Farm in Griswold. High 5 minutes, flip, high 7 minutes. Let it rest for 5 minutes afterwards.

Garden veggies were grilled 20 minutes on Medium, with oil, oregano, parsley, and garlic salt.

Little bit of Peach & Pineapple Salsa as a condiment.

Tragedy...

...is when you grab the bacon from the fridge to fry it up to add to the tater salad you're making, and realize it's "Use By" date as 2-1/2 months ago.

Thought long and hard on that one since it looked fine, and what can go wrong with properly made bacon? Oh well, didn't use it :(



Taters, tomatoes (Mortgage Lifter I believe), cabbage from my garden. Coleslaw doesn't taste as good as week, but maybe I need to let it cure and cool for a while in the fridge. I also should've diced up the apples and cabbage smaller, and diced up the celery in the potato salad more.

That's a nice basket

And I had...take-out for dinner. By the time I finished picking the garden I wanted more then a salad but didn't feel like cooking (and I had no "convenience foods" in the freezer to just heat up :( )

Rebuilding the Onion Bed...

...well, it'll be the carrot bed this fall :)

Tilled it once...


Shoveled it...


Tilled Twice...


Put in some grass clippings I picked up at the dump on Friday...

Worked them in with the gravelly soil underneath and some topsoil from the side piles...


Another layer of grass clippings...


Used half the load :)


I'll let it settle down for a couple days and plant carrots sometimes this week. It'll be back to onions in the spring. Next spring I should also get a small soil screen and shovel it through to remove more of the stones from the soil.

Lindsey Stirling

Cool!

Parkour Pit!

Night full of gastronomic firsts!

Pork steak from Campbell's Farm in Griswold.

First yellow tomatoes I've grown & eaten (that I can remember). Grew them when Mom mentioned she liked then and her father used to grow them. I like 'em -- much milder flavor then the reds.

First coleslaw I've made, from the first cabbage I've successfully harvested.

Pork Steak:
I'm thinking 8 minutes high, flip, 8 minutes medium. This was overcooked, need to play with the time in the future.

Coleslaw:
One head of cabbage chopped up.
Can of pineapple slices, diced up. Added juice to the mix.
Two apples, one shredded, one diced.
Three carrots, shredded.
One lemon, juiced.
Cains mayonaise, olive oil, red vinegar -- don't really know the amounts or proportions, I just eyeballed it. Whisked together then mixed into the slaw.

Awesome Steak!

Porter House T-bone from the Hunter's Brookside Farm in town (via Brooklyn Beef & Fish)

High heat, five minutes per side, five minute rest -- the first bite almost melted in my mouth. Wish I had plates I could heat up like they do in the steakhouses to keep it warm during the meal, of course I'd have to clear off a real table to eat at instead of my computer desk while watching Star Trek Next Generation on Netflix :D

It was the best one I've ever cooked, and one of the best I've ever had -- last time I had one in the same class was to Ruth's Chris.

All the veggies except the carrots were from my garden; the taters I dug up coming home from the data center this evening -- not five minutes from the dirt to grill.

Veggies were coated in olive oil, dash of pepper, dash of Chinese Five Spice and grilled for 20 minutes.

I've gotten used to eating a palm-sized piece of meat usually -- and my eyes proved bigger then my stomach even with the great steak...one of those pieces and one half of a tater went to the fridge (along with the rest of the T-bone!).

A good last day of the forty first year...

Dropped off Cindy at the airport earlier, squeezed in most of a day at work, and then worked in the garden for three hours this evening.

Though please note -- if you have a fancy car that has headlights which turn themselves on, and you park it in the shade by the garden, and listen to the radio for two hours...you might have trouble starting it afterwards :D

Not a good onion harvest this year -- I didn't do a good job keeping them weeded (plus I don't know how much the relatively dry weather impacted them):



Got the inner garden cleaned up, and planted fall crops today:
-- Lettuce (several kinds)
-- Chard (two kinds)
-- Cabbage
-- Broccoli
-- Peas


Hmmm...now I have to figure out what to do with cabbage:




What I envision having:

(From Photos by Garth)

What I end up with:




Trying some fishing line, with a hook-n-spring so I can take it down to work...in theory it'll scare off deer who hit the "invisible" line. It's not a hard fence, but we'll see if it deters them from my beans.






I managed to defend these late-season Daylillies successfully against the deer this year (only have one doe and two fawns and they haven't been putting much pressure on me this year compared to some previous deer families I've had!!!)

Tikkannen's Berry Farm

Yes, I'm catching up on photos today :)

I've "discovered" Reino "Ray" Tikkanen's (what a great Finnish name!) berry farm on the Sterling/Foster town line. Been getting a couple pounds of blueberries a week from there -- no need for supermarket bananas or strawberries for breakfast this time of year :)

Farm Profile: Tikkanen Berry Farm by Juliette Rogers Published: August 16, 2006 STERLING, CT - Tucked away on a country road that snakes and curves back and forth across the Connecticut/Rhode Island state line, Ray Tikkanen’s berry farm lies in a little valley crossed by a trickling brook. He’s been farming here since 1946, when he returned from the Pacific and his uncle offered to help set him up raising laying hens on his farm. Ray stayed in egg production until 1970, when he “saw the writing on on wall” in US farm policy and how the poultry business was driving egg producers to go into cage plants in order to survive. The industry was consolidating, and producers were dependant on middlemen who bought their eggs at a price of his choosing, and resold them for a profit. Since he didn’t see much of a future in eggs, he reckoned he had two choices: leave farming to work at Pratt and Whitney, or convert the farm to something else.

http://www.farmfresh.org/food/farm.php?farm=7

You sort of need to know where you're going -- he's on Calvin French Road, and while there's a sign pointing towards his place from Cucumber Hill Road...he doesn't have any more signs at the other turns you need to make, until you see his farm sign!

We roasted a pig!

For Eric's 40th.

The guy who owns the trailer has two of them -- we were doing it ourselves, he was catering another party with his other trailer. When he's catering, he starts it at home twelve hours before dinner and then drives over with it roasting a couple hours before dinner.

He raises his own pigs, so between his farm, Stearn's where it was slaughtered, and Eric's the pig had never been more then five miles as the crow flies.

He dropped off this trailer and pig the night before, showed me & Eric what to do to run the equipment. We put bags of ice over the pig overnight, and Eric lit it off at 5am.


Checking out the pig the night before. His younger daughter is at that cool age where she didn't get freaked out -- she came up a little tepidly, but after thinking about it for a moment decided it was pretty neat. Her older sister wanted to avoid any sight of it what so ever!


And the party day.


Carving it up. The guy in the checkered shirt actually knew what he was doing (he grew up in a community where someone was roasting something every weekend)...the rest of us where following his directions. If he hadn't been there, it wouldn't has been as organized as we read off stuff printed from the internet :D




Delicious!

Oscar at Eric's Party

Went up in the morning to help finish setting up Eric's Two-Thirds Done (40th B'day) party (and help with the pig)...Oscar came along.

Stinky of course decided to go under the roaster and got grease all over his head, which meant he got a bath at Erics...which is why he still looks half-wet in some of the photos.

Marinated Vegetables...

I chose to say this was a bold culinary decision -- to marinate potatoes, zuchinni, yellow squash, yellow beans, green beans, and yellow onions from my garden overnight in a mix of olive oil, red wine vinegar, pepper, and Chinese Five Spice.

The decision to marinate was in no way related to discovering I was out of gas last night after cutting them up :D



Little Sweet & Sour sauce as a condiment; betcha a little homemade sweet relish (if I had any...) would've been perfect with it.

The marinade probably worked out just as well, since the zuke, squash, and beans were picked a couple days past their prime. Not bad, just I have to start visiting the garden at least three times a week now :D

Awesome road side stand!

Had to make one of my rare journeys to the corporate office today, after first picking up some equipment at the data center -- I live roughly halfway between the two, so that was a 180+ miles of driving for work today! Took the scenic route back from New London, through Ledyard & Preston, and found this roadside stand in Preston City selling perennials! $20 bought me seven plants :) They might be pretty scraggly by commercial nursery standards, but for cheap money I don't mind waiting for them to grow here! Hopefully I can get them planted Tuesday night, I was moving some more Daylillies tonight.

Is that a peavy in your bike rack, or are you just happy to see me?

Or are you just happy to see me?

Why yes, yes it is. In fact, there's also a 372XP in my trunk!

Eric called me at 10pm the previous night -- a tree I had previously told him to have a tree service take down at his rental property because it was too close to the neighbors for me to handle...finally came down it's own.  

Knew I only needed a few select things...and hey, it saved at least $7 of gas versus taking the pickup :)

Lobster Lunch

Lobster Roll from a local joint (ain't like in Maine, but I'm not in Maine...)

Taters, green & yellow beans, onions, squash, zukes from my garden in oil & pepper and cooked on the grill.  With a dash of sea salt once it got to my plate.  Everything but the taters (Monday evening) were picked immediately before lunch :)

Harvest Meal...

Yukon Gold taters, yellow squash, zuke, onion, green beans, yellow beans...all from my garden. Oil & Pepper, wrapped in Reynolds Wrap, grilled up with a steak :)

A triple today!

First taters, first maters, and first green beans out of the garden!

Found the potatoes when weeding a flower bed last night -- it was the potato bed last year, so that wasn't surprising.  They went well with lunch:

Tonight I was doing some more weeding, and had a couple cherry tomatoes and a couple baby green beans fresh off the vine!

Could've even had a small summer squash if I had wanted to :)

Miscellaneous Stuff...

Various stuff I've found over the last month...
Joyce Ballatyne -- apparently a PG-13 version of Norman Rockwell :)

Links to more of her stuff here and here.

Another Steampunk...love the soft lighting and the loom in the background (one of the best pics from technical & content I've seen!):
Stu finally got laid off -- he's one of those characters you meet that you'll NEVER forget! He's a pretty simple guy, but epitomizes the Improv principal of "just say yes" and see what happens when you don't hold yourself back:
http://www.telegram.com/article/20120624/COLUMN27/106249579

Nick Kotsopoulos Politics and the City
Several “suits” recently gathered outside the Telegram & Gazette building on Franklin Street for a press conference.

Among them were Lt. Gov. Timothy P. Murray; U.S. Rep. James P. McGovern, D-Worcester; City Manager Michael V. O'Brien; state Rep. John Mahoney, D-Worcester; Craig L. Blais, president of the Worcester Business Development Corp.; and Richard K. Sullivan Jr., secretary of the state Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.

Standing behind Mr. Murray during the press conference, and between Mr. Mahoney and Mr. McGovern, was a rather unassuming guy dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. It was Stu Herman, and he was there simply as an observer.

To say that Mr. Herman looked out of place among all the “suits” at the press conference would be a bit of an understatement.

In reality, though, he was very much right in place; in fact, he fit in just fine and was more than welcomed.

You see, Mr. Herman, very much a blue-collar working guy, is well-known to many local politicos, even though he is not actively involved in politics or government in any way.

He has made friendships over the years with several politicians and has had a Forrest Gump-like knack of popping up in places with prominent political figures, including those who had presidential aspirations and some who even ended up in the White House.

When George H.W. Bush made a presidential campaign stop in Worcester back in the 1980s, Mr. Herman not only met Mr. Bush, but he also got some personal tips from him about his upcoming vacation. When Mr. Herman mentioned that he was about to go on vacation to China, Mr. Bush, who had served as an envoy to China for President Gerald Ford, took time to suggest places for him to visit while in China.

“He was a really nice guy, very friendly,” Mr. Herman, a lifelong Worcester resident, recently recalled.

Over the years, Mr. Herman has also brushed shoulders and had encounters with many other national figures, such as Jimmy Carter, Edward M. Kennedy and members of the Kennedy family, John Kerry, George McGovern, Bill Clinton, George Wallace, Ralph Nader, Tipper Gore, Mitt Romney and Deval Patrick, just to name a few from the state and national level.

And there were many on the local level as well, especially folks such as Mr. Murray, Mr. McGovern and Mr. Mahoney.

There was the time when Mr. Kerry was marching in a parade in Worcester with Mr. Murray. When Mr. Murray happened to see Mr. Herman standing among the crowd lining the street, he waved him over so he could have his picture taken with Mr. Kerry as the parade was going on.

“Stu's a good man,” Mr. Murray said last week. “I've run into him at a lot of places and a lot of situations. He's one of those guys who understand Worcester in the best sense of things.”

Mr. Herman also had many friends in the sports world, most notably longtime Boston Red Sox fan-favorite Johnny Pesky and former Red Sox catcher and hometown hero Richie Gedman.

When I worked in the Telegram & Gazette Leominster Bureau in 1978, I went to cover a baseball clinic Mr. Pesky was conducting at Doyle Field. After the clinic, I went to interview Mr. Pesky, and when I told him I was from the T&G the first thing he asked me was: “How's my good friend, Stu Herman?”

For the past 43 years, Mr. Herman has worked at the Telegram & Gazette. For many years, he has handled the mail that goes in and out of the building, as well as being in charge of newspaper back copies.

It was his employment at the T&G that gave him access to the many politicians who passed through the doors at 20 Franklin St., either to meet with the editorial board or reporters. Mr. Herman knew when these folks would be in the building and he made a point of being there when they arrived — sometimes to the chagrin of some who felt it was inappropriate for a non-news person to badger those people.

But Mr. Herman said no one ever gave him the brushoff. In fact, many often took the time to talk with him, and some even obliged with an autograph or posed for a photograph.

There were times when Mr. Herman even had more access to political figures and their families than reporters did.

Back in 1978, President Carter's mother, Lillian, came to Worcester to participate in a friendship exchange that was going on with teenagers from Ireland. One of her first stops was the mayor's office in City Hall, and before she arrived her security people made it perfectly clear that all reporters had to stand in the hallway well away from the mayor's office when she arrived. There would be no access to Mrs. Carter.

But that didn't stop Mr. Herman, who happened to be there as well. When the elevator opened and Mrs. Carter emerged, he made a beeline right to the president's mother. What was most remarkable was that he not only got right up to Mrs. Carter, though he did startle her a bit, but he got to shake her hand — actually it was more like squeezing her arm — and talk to her, all while her security stood by. It was like they knew who he was.

Then there was the time when President Clinton came to the DCU Center. Several reporters expecting to cover the president inside the building were being turned away by the Secret Service, but Mr. Herman somehow got in.

“They began kicking out reporters, then a Secret Service guy came up to me and asked if I worked for the T&G,” Mr. Herman recalled. “When I told them I did, they let me in.”

Perhaps the quintessential Stu Herman “brush with greatness” occurred at a Democratic State Convention held at the DCU Center.

Mr. Herman was walking around the convention floor when someone came up to him and told him he had to take a seat. When he asked where he should sit, he was directed to an unoccupied seat among some people — it just so happened they seated him with the Kennedy family.

“When I sat down I realized I was sitting next to Caroline Kennedy and in front of me was John Kennedy Jr.,” Mr. Herman recalled.

It also just happened that when Mr. Herman went to take his seat, his camera lens accidentally conked JFK Jr. on the back of his head.

“I apologized to him, and he told me not to worry,” Mr. Herman said. “He was pretty good about it. He told me he was all right and there was no problem. They were both very nice people.”

Unfortunately, these kinds of stories may be no more.

Sadly, Mr. Herman's job at the T&G is being eliminated with the move of the newspaper to 100 Front St. His last day is Friday, which happens to be 43 years to the day since he started here.

“I'll miss a lot of the people here,” said Mr. Herman, who began working at the T&G when he was in high school. “I'm looking for a new job, but I don't know what's going to happen. I don't want to sit around and collect (unemployment). I want to work; I need to work.”

Hopefully, Mr. Herman will land on his feet and find a new job soon.

Meanwhile, his departure will leave this newspaper without its unofficial greeter to visiting political movers and shakers of this country, this state and this city. You can bet, though, that some of those who have been to the paper in the past will be looking for him the next time they stop by.