My Anonymous Blog

The (Snow) Shoe's About To Drop

I took a walk through Central Park the other day to admire the quickly falling leaves. It was beautiful, almost like walking through a painting. See for yourself:

Bloody Dexter Salad & My Brand New All-Pastry Blog!

Halloween was a blast this past Sunday, and things were kept very small - just five people total, which allowed for an intimate full meal instead of the usual BOOffet that lines the dining area at Matthew's.

The menu was deliciously spooky: Bitter green BOOschetta & Dorie Greenspan's terrifying BOOgere; Bloody Dexter Salad; GHOULash; Pumpkin Tart with Sichuan ice SCREAM.

We ate, we ate & we ate some more, and in between managed to carve a few pumpkins & watch the parade crawl up 6th Ave, turning the Village into an impassable knot of masked revelers until well after the witching hour had passed.

Good, good fun! And with that done, we're all thrown into the holiday folds of November with little warning at all (or choice!). And now that the leaves are mostly gone from the trees, I'm left with that pit in my stomach that several months of extreme cold & wet could drop from Mother Nature's bowels at a moment's notice.

But there are cheerier things to focus on ... like my new all-pastry blog I'm working on that I'll announce the name of here (& only here at first!) shortly. I'm excited! And I know many of you have asked & pushed me to do this long ago - thank you for the encouragement! I eat and obsess over more pastries than my arteries would prefer, and I'm excited to expand my thoughts, share recipes and discover bakeries in a format larger than my current 140-character Twitter habit allows.

More on that soon! Really soon - I promise this time!

Boo

Did I startle you with a sudden post after weeks on nothingness? Good! Mwa ha ha ha ha! My summer plan to regularly update the rusty old blog has failed, although my tweets live on. I am working on another project that hopefully will launch just in time for Halloween, so stay tuned!

And speaking of, my hood is all spooked out for Sunday's trick-or-treaters. I am safely tucked into a locked apartment building, so none will actually reach my door, but the mini ghouls & ghosts will run quickly, fueled by sugar, up and down the cobwebbed stoops of neighboring brownstones, collecting edible treats from complete strangers with parental approval. It's my favorite day of the year and I'm planning a scary feast with a few friends overlooking the Halloween Parade in the West Village.

 Sent from my iPhone

9/11/2010

Three images of lower Manhattan taken along the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights last night at sunset.

Sent from my iPhone

Oliver Meets a Cat

I'm testing HD video upload from my phone. Not sure if it's working, or maybe this is as good as it gets.

 

Ollie

Ollie keeps me great company while I'm checking my email (when he isn't ripping off keys & hopping away with them).

Sent from my iPhone

Random Clips From the North Shore of Minnesota

Here are a handful of clips from my cell phone taken this past week:

1. Short clip of a visiting hummingbird:

 

2. The alpine slide at Lutsen Mountain, where I was too slow even for the slow lane (Matthew passes me at one point on the fast track, even though there were several people in front of him): 3. A view from the cabin deck: 4. Another view from the cabin, with a few more gulls than Matthew & Shuli would have preferred (I might have fed them and created an unintentional Hitchcockian ambiance on the deck): 5. Mall of America - this was my first clip taken with my new iPhone 4 bought moments before in the mall and I just can't throw it out even though there is nothing of interest in the clip! I have some kind of hoarding issue surrounding video and photo files it seems. 6. Finally, here's a snippet from the sunrise over Lake Superior taken last Thursday morning from the cliffs of the Pink Cove. The screaming birds are pissed off peregrine falcons that nest on the cliffs below. Even though I'm not anywhere near their nest, they still start screaming over the slightest disturbance. They have been there for about five years now and have three babies this year that look like they are about ready to fly. They sit on the edge of the rocky ledge where the nest is looking out, and even squawk loudly just as their parents do. I watched them for a while through binoculars from a kayak later this same morning. Anyway, here's the sunrise:

Taco Night

We're always cooking at La Chouette. There is a clubhouse that offers dinner service on most evenings, but the mostly high school cafeteria style fare of boiled-to-death veggies & rubbery dinner rolls can't pull us away from barbecuing, something we don't get to do in New York.

Taco night, now a staple on the Beaver Bay menu, was the best it had ever been this year once Matthew's mesquite BBQ pork & Shuli's tomatillo sauce were added in.

And it couldn't have been a prettier scene out the window - as we chewed away at too many tacos to count, a passing squall over the lake broke at sunset to reveal a rainbow that seemed impossibly large and bright.

Sent from my iPhone

Little Ollie

Oliver is happy to be back following his first stint at the bird boarders since I adopted him. The staff of vets, vet techs & volunteers loved him & asked repeatedly when he'd be coming back when I picked him up. When I called to check on him almost daily, he was almost always already out & riding around on the shoulder of somebody. They said he was rare in how tame he was and at ease in new surroundings - I'd like to take partial credit because I try hard to keep him socialized with lots of different people & eating many kinds of foods, but caiques are kind of this way from birth anyway. I do think that, even for a caique, he is particularly fearless and full of curiosity about life.

Here he is looking out the window earlier this afternoon, a familiar sight around here when I'm home (and one I've posted before and will again I'm certain), as he loves seeing what is going on in the neighborhood.

Sent from my iPhone

Black-eyed Susans

I'd never been in August to Beaver Bay before & was excited to see the difference between summer & early spring foliage (May in that part of the world is when spring finally peeks out with real intent), when we usually arrive. In the weeks in May leading up to Labor Day, there's barely a green bud showing on the trees when we get there, and by the time we leave spring is in full force. It sounds cliche, but you literally can almost see leaves appearing on the trees by just watching them for an afternoon.

One of the things that surprises me in May are the lack of flowers, and yet, there are many hummingbirds already darting around in the freezing air along the lakeshore looking for nectar. There obviously must be enough to get them by before more flowers pop out, but it doesn't seem like it by looking around at the still somewhat wintry scene. As soon as I hang the feeder out in May, hummingbirds flock to & squabble over rights to feed at it within an hour or two!

In contrast, August is loaded with blooms, and while the hummers seemed happy to have the feeder out, they didn't use it for a good day or two and were often seen feeding from the large assortment of blooms found around the cabin.

These black-eyed Susans were one of my favorite sights along the trail & roadside this summer.

Sent from my iPhone