Beautiful Food – January 2016

It’s been cold this past month. That has translated into beautiful foods that are warming. Even my light lunch of stuffed pitas and cucumber slices had a little warmed from the toasted pitas. The stuffing was a hardboiled egg mashed with roasted garlic hummus. It looked and tasted to good I ate one of the pita wedges before I remembered to take a picture!

And there is the standby quick meal of stir fry with eggs. This one had bell peppers, celery and cauliflower. I cooked the veggies first and let the onion flakes and no-salt seasoning sit in the whisked eggs. Then I poured the eggs in and stirred until they were cooked. It is a very quick meal and looks good on green glass.

Soup is one of my favorite foods in the winter. This one included tomatoes from the freezer and sweet potatoes – both from the bounty of last summer’s CSA. I cooked them for 5 minutes in chicken broth (with added seasoning like basil, dried onions, dried garlic, pepper) then added some soba noodles. After another 5 minutes I used my potato masher to turn some of the chunks into broth thickener. I poured it in the bowl and topped it with some pumpkin seeds. I like the brilliant color of tomatoes and sweet potatoes.

Of course there is still the clean-out-the-crisper stir fry. This one has zucchini, red bell pepper, savoy cabbage, onion, and dry roasted peanuts.

And that’s the highlights of the ‘beautiful food’ I ate in January.

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 30, 2016

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

What will power tomorrow’s spacecraft? – Lots of options – some ready now and others being developed.

Stock Your Pantry with Plant-Based Protein – I’m not as keen on soy products (except for the nuts themselves) but I have most of the rest in my pantry already; they store well and can be easily be used for quick meals.

Tea or coffee: Which drink is better for you? – Does it matter? This analysis says it is a draw. Tea does not interfere as much as coffee with sleep but is does stain tea more.

New Bioplastic Mashup Spells Doom for Petrochemical Industry – DuPont and Archer Daniel Midland join the flurry of activity in the bioplastic arena….and they may be big enough to overcome the entrenched political interests supported by the petroleum industry. It is good to understand that as we move to a more sustainable tech….plastics will still be around.

A natural beauty: American geoheritage – Geoparks (a UNESCO designation) are becoming popular around the world but not in the US because of political differences within our country. There are over 100 areas in 34 countries that are designated as Geoparks at this point. Over the next year, we’ll be hearing more about them culminating in the 2016 Earth Science Week (Oct. 9-15). A list of countries and sites is available here.

So You Want to Eat Snow. Is It Safe? We Asked Scientists – I do enjoy snow ice cream….but I wait until it has snowed for a while before I collect the snow.

20 Indoor Air Pollution Tips – I heard most of these before….but it is good to see them collected into a single list. I’m glad they included scented products and sprays on the list.

Women Asked to Avoid Pregnancy as Zika Epidemic Worsens – A story to follow since the mosquitos that carry the virus are relatively widespread….it is just that they are not infected with the Zika virus yet in the US. Asking a population to avoid pregnancy is not a solution…but 3,500 (and probably growing) cases of microcephaly will impact lives and economies for years to come.

8 Great Benefits of Walking – A good list with links to the research that backs up the claims.

Best Things about Electric Cars – Results of a survey of electric car owners.

Tucson Botanical Garden

We visited the Tucson Botanical Garden back in January 2015 (did three posts about it: butterflies, garden and poison dart frogs. There is a new building that is the garden entrance and gift shop – with a lot more room than the older structure that was originally a house. We knew about the butterfly exhibit from last year and headed for that as soon as it was open since the air temperature was still pretty cool outside. Inside the greenhouse it was steamy and warm. I enjoyed the orchids and other tropical plants.

There were fewer butterflies than last year but one sat on my husband’s hat for a very long time. Can you see the curled proboscis?

Another sat high on some foliage and posed with wings wide open. The markings make the upper wing look pleated.

I only saw one poison dart frog and did not get a good picture. Disappointing. But….the docent told me that they have tadpoles; if they are successful raising them the population will be larger next year. The poison dart frog live multiple years and were originally brought to the butterfly house to eat fruit flies attracted to the fruit put out for the butterflies.

Outdoors, I noticed better signage this year for birds, lizards, and material for basket making. The signage is tile or protected by glass to survive the very hot temperatures of Tucson in the summer.

I saw a tiled bench with a pomegranate motif

And then the plant itself!

Arizona is famous for its geology and its deserts so I took a number of rocks/minerals along with desert plants.

Some of the colorful rocks look like they’ve been painted but the crystals of the mineral are often visible!

There were two special cactus images this time: a colorful one

And a dead one (for some reason – the curves in this piece of cactus stem appealed to me…maybe I should use it as a starting point for a Zentangle pattern).

Ten Days of Little Celebrations – January 2016

I enjoy the big celebrations of the year....but the little celebrations that happen daily are the ones that keep me going all year long. Here are my top 10 for January 2016:

The most recent celebrations have to do with snow:

• Getting home from the airport in the ice and snow (it had just started coming down…so nothing had been treated yet)
• A snow big enough to cover everything and close just about everything – snow days and snow ice cream

I travelled to Tucson, Arizona this month and about half the celebrations are associated with that trip (and I still have a lot of posts in the works about that travel):

• Birds of southern Arizona (hummingbirds and turkeys!)
• Mount Lemmon (snow at the top)
• Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum (plants and free flight raptor programs)
• Tohono Chul (steps to the roof as plant stand, rocks, small meditation garden)
• Tucson Botanical Garden (butterfly exhibit…cactus…rocks)

January 2016 included my 43^rd wedding anniversary....maybe that should be a ‘big’ celebration!

There was also a funeral in the family this month – a sad event but also a celebration of a person’s life and of continuity of family over long periods of time.

And last but not least, I spent more than a third of the month away from home ---- so it was a celebration just coming home again (in time for the big snow).

Zooming – January 2016

The zooming post has more birds, cactus and butterflies this month. Can you find the turkey…the quail…the hummingbird…the barn owl…and the blue jay?

If you want to see an enlarged version of a collage – click on it and a window with the enlarged version will appear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Intimate Landscapes – January 2016

This is the fourth month for my Intimate Landscapes series (after reading Eliot Porter’s Intimate Landscapes book (available online here)) featuring images from January that are: smaller scale but not macro, multiple species, and artsy.

There is only one picture from Maryland this month – the frozen edge of a stream with pebbles showing, dark leaves caught on the surface, green and brown plants around the edge.

All the other images are from Arizona this month…I’ve saving the wintery ones for February since I had so much to share from Arizona. The colors are often subdued- the greens of saguaro and desert brush, the browns of twists of dead wood and occasional water, the whites of rocks.

And then there are sudden bursts of color that draw the eye – oranges…and yellows.

I made a slide show of the other intimate landscapes that appealed to be in Tucson – a vine growing on a purple wall, the color variation in prickly pear, a lone flower in front of a white wall, a very small cactus surrounded by black rocks and fallen leaves from its nurse tree that shades it during the hottest part of the summer, small saguaro getting big enough to show among the palo verde and cholla, groupings of cactus with colorful spines, young saguaros lined up in rows between lighter leaved plants and yellow flowers with palo verde in the background….such are the intimate landscapes around Tucson.

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 23, 2016

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Breakthrough discovery reveals how thirsty trees pull water to their canopies – It is cohesion and gravity rather than atmospheric pressure that is the driving principle. I always thought it was due to ‘capillary action’ but that term is not mentioned in the article at all.

Giant Clams Light Up Like Plasma Screens, Only Better – Potential for organic displays…..using the giant clam mechanism for power and color.

Photography in The Parks: Accessible Zion Through the Seasons – Nice to know that Zion has something for everybody. I missed it a few years ago when the government was shut down while I was in the area….want to try again.

How do birds stay warm on a cold winter’s night? – Huddling together seems to be popular. The article suggests providing nesting boxes to help the birds find a good place just after sunset. And another post about birds - Snow birds: 10 birds to look for in winter. The feeders at Sapsucker Woods (Ithaca, NY) have a camera on them; the video feed is here. The birds in this post are not what is visiting my feeder and bird bath right now; I’m seeing cardinals, juncos, blue jays, and doves almost every day.

Scientific Illustrator Hand-Paints Giant Mural Featuring 243 Modern Bird Families – Next time I am in Ithaca NY (Cornell University) – I’ll want to see the mural.

Infographic Offers a Valuable Guide to Feeling Happier in Your Life – Lots of variables…and this is all a matter of statistics. There are happy people that don’t meet all these….and the genetics part is something we can’t change anyway! Another perspective on the same topic from BBC Futures: A 7-day guide to the pursuit of happiness.

Arthropods Abundant in American Homes – The average US household contains 62 distinct families of arthropod species. They range from cockroaches and fleas to carpet beetles and book lice…ants. They are our (mostly) quiet and benign roommates.

Why do we get ‘eye floaters’? – Many people notice them…but they impact vision in very few cases. They are causes when small debris gets into the vitreous humor – the jelly like mass between the retina and the lens in our eyes….that is not replenished or replaced.

The Chemistry of Bread Making – A graphic from Compound Interest.

3 Free eBooks – January 2016

So many books to choose from...so little time....

Denon, Vivant. Egypte : documents d'art Egyptien d'aprés la Description de l'Armée Francaise sous Napoléon Ier, L'Expédition d'Egypte, dessins du Baron Denon, et le Musée Egyptine. Paris: A. Guerinet. 1900. Available from the Internet Archive here. Vivant Denon produced a lot of sketches during Napoleon’s time in Egypt and this book is a collection of them. They include a lot of detail.

Walcott, Mary Vaux. North American Wild Flowers. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution. 1925. Five volumes available on the Internet Archive: one, two, three, four, five. I am always thrilled to find books with botanical prints…flowers particularly.

Young, Bonnie and Malcolm Varon. A Walk through the Cloisters. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1979. Available on the Internet Archive here. The art and architecture of Medieval Europe as displayed the Cloisters Museum and Gardens. The gardens – bounded by arches and columns – are always appealing. This book may be a little dated but the photography of the place as it was in the late 1970s is quite good.

Enjoy some good online books!

January Sunrise

January is an excellent month for photographing the sunrise from our front porch: the days are still short so sunrise happens well after my normal time to get up and there are no leaves on the tress to block the view. A little over a week ago – I was lucky enough to catch a sunrise with the moon and Venus visible!

A little later on the same morning I focused on using the sunrise color behind some of our trees. This is the oak. The buds look large for January. They may have started swelling with the warm weather we had in December and early January.

The crepe myrtle has a lot of dried pods that make it look ‘decorated’ all winter long. It makes a good morning silhouette.

Belmont in January

I am working on a winter tree hike for Belmont and did a ‘walk around’ for the route to add to my collection of pictures for the brochure. There were three trees that I focused on:

The Eastern Red Cedar. I realized as I was taking the picture that my grandparents had a pair in the front of their house when I was growing up. Last time I saw the trees – after my grandparents had been gone many years – the trees were gone and I’ve always wondered what happened to them; supposedly Eastern Red Cedars can live for 900 years. My grandfather probably dug them up as saplings from a nearby forest to plan in that yard – or maybe it was the previous owner.

The Dawn Redwood is a tree that is similar to the Bald Cypress – it is in group that usually is evergreen but it is deciduous. The bark is reddish….and the small cones that stay on the tree during the winter are quite interesting looking although you need a zoom on a camera or binoculars to see them!

The Black Walnut had plenty of nuts around its base. They are the easiest way to identify the tree in the winter.

The day I was at Belmont was very cold and a little breezy. I’m always surprises that the species of grass most popular in this area stays green even when it is very cold….but it stops growing so we do get a break on lawn mowing.

Resorts in Hawaii

We spent our first night in Hawaii at the Waikoloa Beach Marriott, where my daughter was finishing up her conference. We walked around the grounds the next morning and saw a number of plants like a screw pine

And Ohi’a lehua.

There were plenty of mynah birds around too

And a large spider in its web.

The lush grounds and fish ponds gave way to the beach.

We came back on our last evening (before we headed to the airport) to photography the sunset.

The resorts cannot close off publish access to the beaches and we walked to one that had a reef later in the week. We saw small crabs in the shallows,

Other birds,

And colorful reef fish that were coming into fish pounds that had a connection with the sea.

Our last experience with a Hawaiian resort happened when our flight was delayed by a mechanical problem. We arrive about 10 and had to leave to get back to the airport by about 2:30….so I only saw the Royal Kona Resort in the dark! I could tell there was lush vegetation and that the courtyards and hallways were open air. I was thrilled that the rooms were air conditioned. The most different feature of the room was sliding louvre doors as the window treatment for the sliding glass door to the balcony.

Previous Hawaii Posts:

• Getting to Hawaii
• Thurston Lava Tube and Kilauea Iki Trail
• Chain of Craters Road
• Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden
• Lava Tree State Park
• Maunakea
• Akaka Falls State Park
• Puu Makaala Natural Area Reserve
• Punalu’u Black Sand Beach, South Point, and Green Sand Beach
• Helicopter over Hawaii
• Maunaiki Trail – Ka’u Desert Hike
• Halema’uma’u Crater
• Mauna Ulu and Sulphur Banks Trail

Mauna Ulu and Sulphur Banks Trail

The first part of our last day in Hawaii was spent in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. We drove a short distance down Chain of Craters Drive. We made a quick stop to overlook the Kilauea Iki Trail and I couldn’t resist photographing a fern with crescent shaped sori (clusters of sporangia that contain spores….the beginning of the next generation of ferns).

Our first hike was toward Mauna Ulu - a lava landscape formed from 1969-1974. Like the other trails where plants are sparse – it is marked by cairns. But these cairns are harder to spot because there are so many piles of rocks in the landscape. We must have missed a cairn fairly early on and wondered around a little before we found it again.

There are lots of glassy rocks on this hike and sometimes the lava makes little cracking sounds when you walk on it.

My daughter picked up several pieces of rocks for me to photograph – a lot of color and texture variety. She probably should have been wearing her gloves since tiny shards of glass come off these rocks. I got one in my thumb when I picked up one.

I took pictures of plants that were colonizing the lava too. This area gets plenty of rainfall but is still a very harsh environment. The plants manage to find enough for their survival in tiny cracks. Sometimes they appear to grow out of solid rock! Every bit of green or red catches your attention in a place like this.

There were some lava trees that look very ‘fresh’ with distinct and sharp edges.

There is a sparse forest that one hikes through as the trail leads upward. The lava is relatively smooth and compacted by all the previous hikers (i.e. no little cracking sounds when you walk on it). It still takes a lot of energy to walk along the undulating path. We turned around before reaching the end of the hike.

The last hike we did in the park was back near the visitor center – the Sulphur Banks Trail. It is an easy hike along a board walk.  There are vents on both sides. The Sulphur shows up as yellow splotches mixed with white (gypsum), milky glaze (opal), and red (hematite).

Previous Hawaii Posts:

• Getting to Hawaii
• Thurston Lava Tube and Kilauea Iki Trail
• Chain of Craters Road
• Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden
• Lava Tree State Park
• Maunakea
• Akaka Falls State Park
• Puu Makaala Natural Area Reserve
• Punalu’u Black Sand Beach, South Point, and Green Sand Beach
• Helicopter over Hawaii
• Maunaiki Trail – Ka’u Desert Hike
• Halema’uma’u Crater

Longwood Gardens – December 2015 (Part II)

The rest of Longwood Gardens was – as usual – very beautiful. I’ve selected some themes for this post. The first grouping is some ‘artsy’ attempts inside the conservatory: a bamboo forest,

A bent calla lily and

A simple water feature.

The next group are plants I saw growing outdoors in Hawaii; they only survive the winter in conservatories in Pennsylvannia: a bird of paradise and

A hibiscus.

There were also some landscapes I enjoyed: in the conservatory,

A treehouse at the forest’s edge across a grassy lawn,

Around the model trains and

One of my favorite rooms in the conservatory (there is a water feature that gently flows through the central plantings…which change seasonally).

Usually I take a lot of close ups of the orchids. This time I took the room itself. I’d never quite noticed the spirals behind the pots before.

There was a tiered fountain that had been repurposed as infrastructure for succulents and small aloes. I like the muted colors and shapes.

The last grouping is cycad textures. There were several different kinds in the Longwood Conservatory and I focused on the non-leaf structures.

Longwood Gardens – December 2015 (Part I)

I am interrupting the rest of of Hawaii blog posts for two Longwood Gardens posts. We made the trek north to the garden last week. It was more crowded than on any previous visit both because of the season and it was the first non-rainy day in a while. One of the staff told me that they thought there were about 15,00 people in the gardens; the crowd is felt most keenly in the conservatory where the staff set up a one-way path to handle all the people and the visitor center where there are extra staff around to assist people in moving toward the gardens or the exit.

We made our way to the conservatory when we got there since they allowed tripods until noon and the crowds had not arrived yet. Somehow I noticed several fiddleheads just after entering the conservatory – which brought back memories of Hawaii!

Then we focused on winter holiday displays in the conservatory: paperwhites (also near the entrance

Then poinsettias in several colors. I like the color and shapes of the center of the blooms.

The flowers were arranged all around the edges of the central conservator and in hanging shapes overhead.

They were also in the sunken garden with lots of surrounding greenery and sprinklers that kept everything wet.

Sometimes the poinsettias have a very different form; these had layers of smaller petals…still the brilliant red color that was paired nicely with the paperwhites.

There were pink poinsettia’s too

With interesting centers.

Another red flower used to make a tree were anthuriums – another reminder of Hawaii.

The third ‘red’ flower that I noticed were dark red amaryllis.

And there were lilies – both white and pale pink. I suspect these will be part of the display into the spring.

Continuing outside – there were trees decorated with sprays that were edible by birds. What a great idea. They looked like the birds had nibbled – but not nearly as much as I expected. I wondered if the gardeners had refreshed the sprays.

There were also garden themed light displays. This was my favorite – during the daytime…

And at dusk.

There were Canadian Geese enjoying the area round one of the other light displays.

To be continued tomorrow!