what about the plastic animals?

Keep Clean

I had an exciting evening of routine computer maintenance.  Exciting is not the right modifier in that sentence.  Did you know that Firefox for the Mac doesn't delete previous versions of your bookmarks file?  After a couple of years use those suckers begin to take up space.

Dinner was exciting, if it doesn't take much to excite you.  I tried a Malabar Chicken mix I found for only $1.99 in Kalustyan's.  Throw the mix together with chicken parts and water and cook in a saucepan for 25 minutes.  It turned out a little spicy and a lot delicious. 

Pink Heart

I have forgotten what I was going to write about today.

Not Photographed

Variety is the spice of life.  Let's try one without pictures today.  I can't go cold turkey, so this is about three things seen but not photographed.

Whenever I see the turkey in Morningside Park I keep a respectful distance.  Wild turkeys are large and fast and they have been known to attack when they feel threatened.  There were two guys absorbed in a loud conversation yesterday as they approached Hedda.  That would be Hedda Gobbler, the turkey.  Hedda gobbled and ran the other way off the stairs and into flight.  I can't say she was graceful but it was a beautiful sight.  She flew about a block before alighting in a tree.

Much less beautiful this morning was a toilet in the trash on the curb.   The seat cover was down and featured a picture of Betty Boop.  I instantly regretted not having my camera with me as I would have posted it here under the title Betty Poop.

Also of interest this morning.  All the Obama posters that went up along 116th Street a few days ago were  ripped in half or torn down.   Vandals?  Misguided Clinton supporters?  Neighborhood anti-campaign poster vigilantes?  I don't know.  It should be noted that Obama posters way outnumber Clinton posters in the neighborhood.

Making Applesauce

Applesauce is one of those foods that's well worth making from scratch.  I find the stuff from a jar is usually overly sweet with a weird aftertaste.  The basic recipe is very forgiving:

Cut up a bunch of apples and put them in a sauce pan.  Cook over medium-low heat until mushy.  Run through a food mill.  Total time:  30 minutes.  Do this on a Sunday morning so your whole kitchen smells like apples.

In one of my food books I ran across a recipe that had five or six different steps and included lemon zest, lemon juice and salt, among other ingredients.  Way too complicated.

I usually use a mix of apples that have sat in the fridge for too long with fresh apples.  I cored the apples above simply out of habit.  The food mill will catch the seeds so you can skip the coring.  Use a mix of apple varieties or just one type.  If you stick with one variety don't choose Red Delicious or Granny Smith.  The former is just terrible.  Nobody should ever buy a Red Delicious.  Granny Smiths aren't much better and they are overly tart for applesauce.

Add stick or shake of cinnamon if you want.  Add sugar or honey if the sauce is turning out too tart for your taste.  Add water or cider if the sauce is too thick.  Keep in mind that the sauce takes on the color of the apple peels used.  I only say that because the sauce above used a lot of green apples and took on a not necessarily appetizing green tinge.

The sauce is good eaten by itself or used in a cake, such as this guilt-free applesauce cake from Rachelle.  If you want to make feeling guilty applesauce cake substitute whole milk sour cream or yogurt for the lowfat stuff and use two tablespoons of melted butter instead of vegetable oil.  To be really special use olive oil instead of vegetable oil.  Then throw in a half cup each of raisins and walnuts to up the sugar and fat content even more.  A pinch of ground cloves is also good.

When the cake is done serve it in your beautiful living room.

Zane Grey's House

By coincidence, as far as I could tell, the western writer Zane Grey lived in this house just upstream from the Delaware Aqueduct near where the Lackawaxen and Delaware meet.  It was in this house that Grey wrote his most well-known work Riders of the Purple Sage.  Today the house is home to the Zane Grey Museum which is administered by the National Park Service.  The museum was closed when I visited.  According to one of the park brochures I picked up, Grey enlarged this house twice in an attempt to get further away from his growing family while he was writing.

Happy Birthday Little Tomato!

Here how the tomato looks today.  You can see that it is beginning to wrinkle.  As well it should as I bought it one month ago today.  One month!  It was the day after Christmas.  After seeing my father off at Penn Station I went to the grocery store for lettuce and tomatoes so that I could have a fancy sandwich with my leftover roast pork. 

I wonder how it has lasted so long?  Bred for shelf life?  Irradiation?  This is why I tend to stick with in season produce from the farmer's market.  Well, that and the two companions to this tomato only had a vague tomato-like flavor to them.

The Delaware Aqueduct aka the Roebling Bridge

Looking toward Pennsylvania

Cable anchor on the New York side.

Looking toward New York.

A few miles beyond the Hawk's Nest, just below where the Lackawaxen empties into the Delaware, is this curious one-lane bridge.  The roadbed is sunken well below the walkways on either side.  There's a reason for that!  The bridge was originally an aqueduct, designed to carry canal boats loaded with coal from Pennsylvania across the river.  Before the aqueduct was built in 1848 a slackwater dam (I'll put a photo on Flickr sometime soon) was built to slow the Delaware's flow so canal boats could be floated to the other side of the river.  Building the aqueduct greatly reduced the time needed to get the boats across the river.

From there the Delaware and Hudson (D&H) canal headed northeastward to the Hudson River near Kingston.  Then the coal headed downstream to New York City.  In the mid-19th century the D&H Canal Co. was one of the country's largest private companies.  Railroads didn't become more efficient carriers of coal until the late-1800s.

The aqueduct has a wire suspension design.  Each of the suspension cables contains 2150 wires, spun on site and bunched into seven strands.  This is John Roebling's earliest surviving suspension bridge.  Roebling later designed and began construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.  He also built three other suspension bridges along the D&H Canal but they are long gone.

The aqueduct was turned into a private toll bridge following the closing of the canal in 1898.  The bridge slowly fell into disrepair.  The National Park Service bought the bridge in 1980 and restored much of it, the cables and ironwork are original, in 1986.

Today's quiz:  Without resorting to the Internets, what famous author lived on the Pennsylvania side of the bridge in the early 20th century (and is resting there in the early 21st century)?

Today's updates:

1. Nobody appears to be familiar with nesselrode pie.  We may have to take corrective action.
2. Only one guess on the tomato age.  Said age will be revealed Saturday!

Hawk's Nest

This stretch of road just northwest of Port Jervis is known as Hawk's Nest.  The road is about halfway up the cliff.  If it looks familiar that's probably because numerous car commercials have been filmed there.  It is really fun to drive.  The fabulous Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is to the left of the icy Delaware River in the top picture.  The road gets crowded on summer weekends, but it was empty on a winter Tuesday.

Unrelated:  I wish I had known about this in advance.  Today was National Pie Day.  Come on, American Pie Council, you need to get the word out sooner!

Orange and Rockland

Rockland County Courthouse, New City, NY

Orange County Government Center, Goshen, NY

In last week's list of links I pointed to the US County Courthouse group on Flickr.  There's a map on that page indicating the counties in which a courthouse had been photographed.  New York is oddly underrepresented.  To prop up the Empire State, and since I have the good fortune of having many vacation days to use in the next few months, I took a day trip today to photograph the Rockland and Orange County courthouses.  That sounds impressive but the Rockland courthouse is only a ten minute drive from work and Goshen is a mere half-hour beyond that.  I also went sightseeing along the Delaware River (saw two bald eagles!).

The Art Deco Rockland County Courthouse was built in the late-1920s.  The courthouse is on the National Register of Historic Places.  It is the third building on that location since Rockland became a county in 1798.  Before it became a county, Rockland was Orange County "South of the Mountains". 

Today's Orange County is all north of the mountains.  The county seat of Goshen is also home to the Harness Racing Museum and Hall of Fame, which is conveniently located across the street from the county courthouse.  The current courthouse was designed in the Brutalist style by Paul Rudolph, then dean of the School of Architecture at Yale, in 1963 and completed in 1967.  The building is very cubical.

Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

The author Michael Pollan has been making the rounds lately publicizing his new book "In Defense of Food:  An Eater's Manifesto".  The book is an expansion of an essay he had in the New York Times Magazine a year or two ago.  I haven't read the book but the essay was great.  Pollan's tagline for it was simply "Eat Food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants." 

I took the photo above a few minutes ago.  The vine-ripened tomato looks lovely doesn't it?  Anyone care to guess what day it was bought?

In case anyone was wondering, my kitchen and living room aren't combined.  Unlike the kitchen the living room has windows and natural light, making for better photography.