Dutch Baby

I've been wanting to make a Dutch Baby pancake for ages - ever since they hit the blogs a couple of years ago. But somehow I never got around to it until a few days ago. I only have whole wheat flour in the house, so that's what I used, along with almond milk and some amazing eggs from our Middlebrook farm down the road. The yolks were so rich that they actually made the whole batter yellow! I used the recipe from the Food Network that I found by googling and baked the thing in a glass pie dish instead of a cast iron skillet.
And it was delicious! Super filling. Or maybe that's just because no one else was home so I ate the whole thing myself!

Fungus among us

Check out this amazing tooth fungus that Eric found in the yard, growing on a tree that fell down in the recent crazy winds. I think it may have been a locust. The spore print was ivory/creamy but very slight. I'd never seen one like this before!
I checked it out on Roger's Mushrooms (one of my favorite places to go for mushroom info) and it looks like Hericium erinaceus. Edible! I can't wait to try it!

Indian Summer

It's something like 75F out and Julian and I are hangin' in the hammock. Eric and our friend Marc are doing yardwork and Gilda is chewing on sticks. Bliss!

1/2 Marathon Training

Two of my friends from college and I are walking a half marathon in Chicago at the end of October. I've trained by doing a bunch of 4 and 5 mile walks, but I hadn't yet done any longer walks until this weekend.
Yesterday I walked 6.5mi with J in the stroller and Gilda walking along with me. I was planning to just do our regular 4 miles, but J was sleeping so nicely in the stroller that I kept going.
Today Eric watched J while Gilda and I walked to town and back. We stopped for a latte and a blueberry muffin in town, but only for about 15min. Altogether, it was a 9 mile walk and took us 3 hours and 20 min. Including the pitstop. Not so bad! The weather was perfect. I found a bunch of gorgeous yellow Amanita muscaria mushrooms on the way and some shaggy manes (Coprinus comatus)! I have the mushroom magic touch this year - I found the first morel, the oysters, the honey mushrooms, and now these.
My plan is to do one 4mi and one 8-10mi walk each week until the 1/2 marathon. I hope the weather cooperates!

Fall Harvest

It's almost time for Harvest at the vineyard! I always think of it with a capital H because it's such a major happening around here. Harvest is so exciting - all the work that went into the vineyard all year long: the pruning, the tying-on of vines, the weed-whacking, the spraying, the vigilance against birds and raccoons and blackrot and mildew ... It's all finally paying off!
The grapes look fantastic. The picture here is of a bunch of the Cabernet Sauvignon and it looks like they'll be ready for harvest next week. You can tell when they're ready by testing the amount of sugar in the juice. Eric can tell just by tasting them, but he also has a little machine that measures it precisely. The level of sugar at which you start harvesting depends on the type of grape and the preferences of the winemaker.
Pretty soon we'll be harvesting and then it will be time for the crush!

Gilda is. A punk rocker.

Gil-da is. A punk rocker. Gilda is a punk rocker now-ow-ow.
Yes, I dyed Gilda's eyebrows pink. I was eating a beet the other day and thinking about how I could use beet juice as a dye. It's the best shade of reddish pink. I actually wanted to use it to make some kind of diy lipstain and tried mixing it with some lipbalm base that I had laying around. Weird to just have that, I know. That was a dismal failure because the juice (water-based) failed to combine with the balm (wax & oil). Duh. I guess I thought that would happen but was hoping that it would somehow work. It was one of those kitchen science days. The next day I made biscuits that looked beautiful until I took a bite and realized that I had added baking soda instead of baking powder. So maybe it's planetary misalignment or something. The comet Elenin messing up my kitchen projects.
So I ate the rest of my beet raw while googling beet juice dye a d came across a story of a woman in Colorado who was fined for dyeing her poodle pink. Apparently dyeing animals is illegal in CO. Her (brilliant, I think) response was that she had merely stained her poodle with beet juice - not dyed it! So I had to try it on Gilda. I only did her brows, but I think she is rockin' the look.
It only lasted a couple of days though. I might do her head-to-toe one of these days. Breast cancer awareness month jumps to mind as an opportunity to have a pink dog.

Two Wine Recommendations

Eric and his dad have a winery here in Southwest Michigan. So we end up drinking a lot of wine - a lot of their wine, to be sure, but also a lot of other wines that we try for comparison. Their wine is fantastic, and I will always recommend it to anyone. The chardonnay is my favorite, but the Shou is really great too. I just happen to be in a white wine mood of late. And the December harvest Reisling: Mmm.

But I actually wanted to recommend some super tasty & inexpensive wines that we've tried lately. One is the Eins, Zwei, Dry Rheingau Reisling from Leitz. We tried this at a comparison tasting in which we were trying a variety of Reislings and this one was the group favorite.

They're a German winery that does fantastic and affordable wines. This one was around $14. I really liked this one. I had their Dragonstone the other night and it was similarly affordable and delicious. So definitely recommendations for Leitz.
The other wine is the 2010 Vigna Rocca Albana Secca from Tre Monti. Tasty and inexpensive. What more could you ask for? We had this one with a tomato-based stew of garden veggies, mushrooms and fennel sausage and it matched it really nicely. No reason to only drink red wines with tomato-based Italian dishes!

Eric's dad Jim brought both of these over, but he got them from his local wineshop (City-Wide), so they should be generally available.