Random rest of the summer

 Looking at the rest of the pictures from the summer, it appears that we ate a lot.

Butterflied chicken on the grill, cooked sandwiched between two hot cast iron skillets.  Sort of a "chicken cooked under a brick" variant.  We've been getting the chickens from the vegetable box people, and they are spectacularly tasty.

Planked salmon.  We looooove planked salmon, especially with a bay caper mustard drizzle.  It is a good thing that one can use the planks for many more uses than the instructions indicate.

Excessively large cookies.  Pictured: lemon poppyseed.  Current: rye chocolate chip.

Colorful breakfast.  We have to keep up with the fruits from the Milk Pail produce box every week, after all!

Passionfruits.  These ones come off of the vine I planted a couple of years ago in the back yard; we've gotten hundreds of fruits this year.  Most of the time I use the pulp by tossing it into smoothies.

Lots of bread of various types.

Food fuels bike rides :)

And on bike rides, one finds turkeys.

One cannot hunt these turkeys, but they are bold, and everywhere.  I see them hiking too.  The few times Chad went into his office, he has reported the flock that inhabits the Ames campus has been growing exponentially.

Mmmm...turkey...Chad made turkey tamales for Thanksgiving.  We have been eating well.

Another giant mess in the kitchen (aka excess fruit management)

Not too long ago, the grapes in the backyard came ripe.  Yum!  We like fruit.
However, the vermin do too.

We don't want to encourage the vermin, so I mass-harvested all the fruit.  This is maybe half of it.

Turning all the grapes into juice required getting every large pot in the kitchen dirty, of course.

Then I was faced with a lot of juice.  It was pretty juice, but there was quite a bit of it.
One of many bowlfuls:

No more jam needed, as we still have some left from last year's crop.  Didn't want to make fruit leather, as there is a bunch of apricot fruit leather from this year's apricots already extant, with more apricot puree in the freezer.  Too much fruit in the house!!!  What to do, what to do....

I drained a couple tablespoons of whey out of the yogurt in the fridge, mixed it into the bowl of juice, and let it sit for a few days under a loose lid.

Ooooh---bubbles!  It turns out you can easily make fizzy lacto-fermented soda out of fruit juice by adding a bit of whey or various other things to get it started.  Sourdough hooch (the liquid that forms on top of a sourdough starter when you are lazy about feeding it) works too.  As does a teeny-tiny bit of champagne yeast.

My first batch.  I neglected to filter this batch, so there were some grape solids in it that needed to be decanted out.

I moved on from grape to other excess fruits.  Lemons from our overly-laden tree, oranges from the other overly-laden tree, grapefruits that my friend Kathleen was trying to unload.  Small amounts of other fruit bits added in (juice drained off of wild blackberries from my mom's visit, apricots, etc.)  All delicious.  The only disgusting one so far was the one made with soaked pineapple skins, which tasted oddly like bandaids.  I suspect that the outside of that pineapple had some sort of cleaning residue on it, as it came from a conventional grocery store.

Eeew.  Fizzy fermented band-aid-flavored beverage.  One can't win them all.  (And we did eat the pineapple, which was good.  It was just the attempted salvage of some good from the bits that were cut off that failed.)

Back to good stuff.  Occasionally, the surface scum looks sort of interesting, but is harmless.  Stir it back in; the end result is still tasty, as the good microbes outcompete the bad ones.

One challenge with this process is that the fermentation process which generates the carbon dioxide likes to keep going and going and going... If you don't want exploding bottles from excess CO2 buildup, you need to keep them refrigerated after the initial rest after bottling.  Given limited fridge space, this means small batches only.

The current fizzy bottles of yum in the fridge are grapefruit and blackberry lemonade.  Mmmmm.

Pie

We had pie for breakfast this morning.  Or, rather, we had square pi for breakfast this morning.  This came about after a dinner discussion in which Chad tried to give Nim a math problem about areas of telescope lenses when she was tired; the end result was kid repeating "Square Pi" to every question, which then led to me thinking about pie, which then reminded me that the new season apples are starting to come in, which then just necessitated the production of a square apple pie.

Delicious.

Picture not complete, since we devoured part of it before I thought of taking a photo.  Really, it *was* square.  This remainder of the square pi is what we ate this morning.

In case that leaves you wanting, here is the complete and circular pie that was Nim's birthday dessert. Mmmm...lemon meringue.

And speaking of birthday desserts, I'm not sure I ever posted Chad's 50th Birthday Cake of Many Flames.

I think this plank is done.

Salmon grilled on a cedar plank is yummy.  Being a cheapskate, I use the same plank over and over again.  The current one split in half a while ago with no actual functional problems, but I think after last night it is just completely done...

Plank smoldered during cooking, despite having been pre-soaked

Bottom side of plank after final use

The salmon itself was delicious, given that it was wild-caught Coho with a mustard, bay-caper-infused vinegar, rosemary, honey, and lemon zest marinade.

Apricots!

We have an apricot tree.  A petite little apricot tree (given my tendencies toward tree carnage), but it makes lots of delicious Blenheim apricots every year.

Sadly, the squirrels (AKA Voracious Verminous Rats of the Day -- VVRDs) usually get most of the fruit before it is even fully ripe.  Their favored evil strategy is to pick an almost-ripe apricot, take one bite of the ripest part, and then shred the remaining fruit and throw it on the grass below before moving on to the next apricot.  While I don't mind sharing, they don't share.  They just destroy.

Last year, I picked what fruit remained a little early, before all of it could be shredded, and ended up with 31 pounds.

Somehow, in my head, this was not enough.  I've tried bird netting in the past, to no avail, as the VVRDs would chew right through it.  This year I opted to escalate, as I saw bunches of orchards full of fruit trees covered in white bags on a road trip earlier in the year.  Apparently what amounts to be white tyvek bags with zippers are used for both frost and pest protection for fruit trees.  They let air and light and moisture in -- and can be had cheaply off of Amazon.  Naturally I had to try one out.

I didn't want to get a bag that was too small for the tree, so maybe overcompensated with one that was a bit too big.  Not really a problem, except while I was trying to get it on the tree by myself in the wind, while avoiding the power and phone line into the house.  Some trimming of the tree was involved...

Once installed, it reminded me of a giant tent caterpillar next -- except it whoofled around in the wind a lot.  I used a big binder clip to tighten some of it up so one could walk around the corner of the hose without being flailed by the excess fabric.

For a while, it looked pretty successful.  The beginning of June came, and there were no shredded green fruits on the grass.  Yay!

Of course a week later, the VVRDs had figured out how to untie the drawstring at the bottom and had started their usual tricks.  I retied it and taped it down to the trunk thoroughly with clear packing tape.

That lasted another week.

By then, some of the fruit was starting to ripen, which motivated one brave nasty little beastie to launch onto the scary white bag from the neighbors' tree and chew its way in through the top of the bag near the ripest fruit.   Its friends then followed.

Well, at least it slowed them down a little.

Yesterday, after assessing that they had probably ruined 1/3 to 1/2 of the fruit, I decided to pick the remainder even though I had wanted to leave it to ripen on the tree longer.  They already got their share.

I started out by trying to pick with the bag unzipped but still on the tree (it was nice and shady and cooler underneath it), but quickly realized the sticky misfortune of trying to do anything inside a large bag covered with squirrel-shredded apricot detritus.  I could just imagine the monsters making little spitballs out of fruit and shooting them in all directions to cover the entire interior surface.

Now covered in sticky slime, I removed the bag and picked the rest of the fruit.  There were a number of apricots that were half-eaten, but still hanging on the tree, which are disconcerting to grab when all you can see is the good side.  Eeew!

I got lots of fruit, though :)

This heap is estimated at 70lb -- more than twice as much as last year.  Which was too much...  Wait -- what was I thinking???

I blanched and pureed the first 25 pounds that was soft or damaged enough that it needed to be dealt with right away yesterday; some of that is currently drying into fruit leather so that I have enough containers to deal with the onslaught of apricot processing that is still coming.  Fortunately, the oven's "Cook and Warm" setting is low enough that it can act as a dehydrator; I figure I'll let the remaining fruit keep ripening on the counter and just process the ones that are soft every day for some number of days to come...

Drink

Chad doesn't make the same faces as Nim, but occasionally his low coffee indicator light turns on.  Fortunately, this is easy to fix.

Espresso is freely available, from the district full of coffeehouses in Vienna

to Budapest

to eveywhere in between, 

and in the airport on the way home.

It works for Nim, too, even after we got caught in an absolute deluge on on the way to Carnuntum.

Chad's low beer indicator is also easy to fix when on vacation in these parts.

At the restaurant in the old Gellert children's bath, Budapest.  The thing on Chad's head is a fur of  Zsanett's.

An apparently delicious craft brew from Bratislava

The standard Zlaty Bazant  in Komarno

Vienna.  Beers are big in these parts.

 At the Friday night kiosks along the river in Szentendre.

With Frosty in Budapest.

Nim and I found our own beverages.

One of many delicious lemonades -- this one had tons of ginger!

Nestea is her new favorite.

And I could always find a glass of wine.

Food

When the kid looks like this

You need to find an establishment like this

and feed her.

Duck legs work well.

Or ice cream.

Or schnitzel. (Really, she was much happier after the first bite!)

Mere bread and water don't cut it, even when the bread is really good.

And she missed out entirely on the "housemade goose snacks" due to the need for a nap.  (We liked them, though!)