We grew a pumpkin this year! It appears that the squirrels did some sampling.
I made an apple pie with fruit from Lapacek's, including a Wolf River apple. It spent a little too long in the oven - look at the Maillard reactions! - but it still tasted delicious.
Piper sleeping on my lap.
The first female monster cereal mascot. Perhaps the first lesbian one as well. Will the Sheridan Le Fanu estate sue?
I had a nice dinner last night that included some spoils from my trek up north last month. I opened one of my favorite beers, Whispering Embers, from Valkyrie Brewing and set to work.
Whispering Embers is a smoked Oktoberfest and is just delicious. Full of smoky goodness and a firm, though not heavy, dose of malt. Truly autumn in a bottle.
I made a wild rice blend from Rice River Farms up in Spooner to go with some lemon butter chicken.
The chicken was good but definitely needed more lemon.
As October progresses towards Halloween, I have been slowly getting into the spirit of things with “slowly” being the operative word. I’ve been thinking of a good horror movie to watch and have put buying a loaf of Pan de Muerto on my to-do list.
Now that we’re in the middle of the month, the fall colors are just spectacular. Here’s a tree across the street from us in the morning just after the sun breached the horizon.
Everywhere you go, nature provides brilliant scenery as orange, red, and yellow mix with green.
Soon my lawn will be filled with leaves that I am not going to rake. My neighbors will forget all about it when the snow hides the evidence of my laziness. Since I wasn't raking, I instead ambled down to Starkweather Creek where the leaves were slowly changing.
Here’s a shot from the bike path on recent ride:
The community gardens are wrapping up for the season as the Green Man prepares to put the plants to bed for the winter so they can awaken in spring, or so the legend goes.
********
Last week I jumped in my car after work and headed to Chicagoland to meet up with a couple of friends for a concert in lovely Lombard. We were to see Mac Sabbath, a “drive thru metal” band from Los Angeles that I discovered a couple years ago.
As you can see, they dress up as evil versions of McDonalds characters. They perform covers of 1970s era songs by the heavy metal band Black Sabbath but change the lyrics to be about the horrors of fast food, big ag, and whatnot. And so the Black Sabbath song “Electric Funeral” becomes “Organic Funeral”.
Some original lyrics:
Robot minds of robot slaves Lead them to atomic graves Plastic flowers melting sun Fading moon falls upon
Dying world of radiation Victims of man's frustration Burning globe of obscene fire Like electric funeral pyre
And they become:
Robots build diabetes Towers, GMO’s take insecticide showers Carminic acid, Meat paste-goop, Black dyed buns bring green poop
Smuggling toxins over the border, May I take your neurological disorder? Prostate cancer, thyroid disease, MADE TO ORDER AS YOU PLEASE!
But before we got to the Mac Sabbath goodness, there were 2 opening bands. The first was Lung from Cincinnati.
With just an electric cello and drums they were able to bang out heavy yet catchy lo-fi rock. Following them was a band from Texas called Speedealer. They play straight ahead hard core punk a la Minor Threat and The Dead Kennedys. They were energetic and fun.
Finally Mac Sabbath came on.
Ronald McDonald heads flanked the stage and spewed fog at various points throughout the show. The singer’s mic stand looked like a straw while the drums were dressed up as hamburgers.
Yes, there is a high novelty factor but these guys can really play. They do a fine Black Sabbath imitation and there’s a lot of campy humor in the performance. At one point, the singer threw giant inflatable hamburgers into the audience so we could get them bouncing around the room.
These guys put on a show that was just pure, unalloyed fun. I would jump at the chance to see them again. Someone recorded the show with video and kindly posted it online.
********
I took the following day off from work and eventually made my way home. I then made preparations for heading to Milwaukee the following day for a long weekend. Our anniversary was a bust last month so I wanted to take my Frau somewhere. Plus I have a couple friends who live there that I see all too infrequently and we planned to visit with them.
We rolled into the city a bit peckish so our first stop was the Public Market in the Historic Third Ward. It opened in 2005 and is the envy of many here in Madison as we have struggled to open one here for nigh on 15 years. Located next to the interstate with its parking lot directly underneath, it may not have the most scenic of surroundings but someone had the fine idea of painting the support structures to make things a little prettier.
I hadn’t been there in many years and it was full of hungry people now just as it was back then. People were grabbing lunch and doing a little shopping as well. I think most of the stalls are given over to vendors offering ready to eat meals but there are still several selling the ingredients for cooking at home.
At one end a fishmonger offers the bounty of the seas. Other vendors have fresh produce on display as well as baked goods and local beers while a purveyor of spices has seemingly every kind of spice blend imaginable at the ready. I had bought some Grains of Paradise at that very stall on my last visit and was mildly disappointed to find that it was no longer available. It seems that spice blends are better sellers than individual spices these days.
As a non-Milwaukeean, I tend to think of the Public Market and the Third Ward generally as the public face of the city’s renewal after its decent into Rust Belt status. Once a thriving area with a warehouse district, deindustrialization shuttered many businesses and the construction of the interstate destroyed a large swath of the neighborhood.
Today tourists like us and the Milwaukee area’s middle class go to the Third Ward to eat, drink, and play but it belies the city’s many problems which include a high poverty rate and rampant segregation. These are compounded by a state government that has historically been hostile to Wisconsin’s largest city and center of the southeast region of the state which is responsible for, last I read, something like 35% of our economic activity.
In the 1950s the state nullified Milwaukee’s ability to grow by taking away its power to annex surrounding municipalities. Today the state’s funding model is shortchanging Milwaukee and I recently read that Milwaukee County’s public transit system is going to start cutting service because of lack of funding.
Milwaukee deserves better.
Anyway, we had lunch and headed over to Brady Street as the Frau wanted to stop at Peter Sciortino Bakery.
Brady Street is a bit like Willy Street here in Madison or Lincoln Park in Chicago. It began as a working class area in the 1860s, became a bohemian enclave 100 years later with hippies and artists calling it home. Today it’s more gentrified, with all of the expected middle class amenities like cafes, salons, and restaurants. And a juggling supply store.
The bakery was rather busy as a bus had let loose a gaggle of tourists who were buying goodies.
My Frau was keen on getting some cimino cookies which are rolled in sesame seeds.
They were quite tasty as you can see from this near empty box.
The Conservatory has 3 enormous domes with a different climate in each allowing for plants from around the world to have a home in Milwaukee. There’s a desert dome, a tropical dome, and the other one. I had never been there before and I don’t think my Frau had either.
We began in the dome that I cannot recall the climate of exactly but I suppose it was the temperate one and it was bursting with colorful flowers that didn’t seem at all exotic.
Next was the desert dome lush with cacti.
It was also home to several doves.
At one point I came across this plant, a Tongaland Cycad from South Africa:
That red cone in the center looks pretty but I got vague horror movie vibes from it, as if it would burst sending countless spores into the air which, when breathed in, would kill the helpless botanist or onlooker. Or turn them into a pod person.
Next up was the tropical dome. We stepped inside and were accosted by the heat and humidity, a sharp contrast to the chilly, overcast day outside.
As more of a boreal person, I felt a bit like a fish out of water in the desert dome. Not a lot of cacti here in Wisconsin, although we have some. Plus, I’ve been to the desert southwest so it felt foreign but I still had a passing familiarity. However, being in the tropical dome was truly to be amid alien corn. Some plants had these big, broad leaves that were waxy.
And then there was the Sausage Fruit tree.(?!)
Apparently these fruit can grow up to 2 feet long and weigh up to 20 pounds! Sadly, they are not edible for we humans. I suppose that it’s an appropriate tree for a city awash in bratwurst and kielbasa and that has a sausage race at its baseball games.
There was also a banana tree.
I had no idea that bunches of bananas had a long, dangly bit.
The Domes were really neat and the cool fall air had a little extra bite as we stepped outside. We could now check into our hotel so off we went back to downtown.
********
Bonus photo. Madison recently put a few 100% electric buses into service and I finally got to ride one recently. It was much quieter than a diesel bus and it also sounded very different. Plus it has a rear window! It was genuinely odd to be able to see out the back. It was like the engine was missing.
There is a tree across the street that began changing color in late August. At
first it was just a handful of leaves scattered here and there. But a few more turned every
day and, before I knew it, the scene out front was clothed in green and yellow - evidence of autumn.
It mocks us
every time we look out of our picture window, serving as a reminder that cooler
temperatures are on the way along with leaves to rake. Not far behind that will be snow in need of shoveling, icy sidewalks to traverse, and ever increasing heating bills.
While I like
winter, I sometimes wish we could fast forward through fall. It's a time of endings.
Birds migrate away, the trees lose their withered leaves, plants die, and so on. It'd be nice
to get through that phase more quickly and just arrive at winter with all of its
lovely snow, the cups of hot cocoa, and the Frau's nightly jeremiads issued
from the folds of her electric blanket about how cold she is.
But polar
vortices are still a few months away and I intend to enjoy the autumn as much
as I am able. This will involve taking in the colorful foliage, fresh apples, pumpkin dishes, not sweating immediately upon exiting the shower, et al. Right now I am trying to schedule one last lawn mowing for the year. Can I make it until October? Since we lost 2 out of our 3 trees, my lawn doesn't get anywhere as leafy as before and the first mow of spring mulches the previous autumn's leaves, getting rid of the evidence of my laziness.
As the seasons change, so do my eating habits. In addition to foods that are freshly harvested, cooler weather means heartier fare. I have started by grabbing a bag of the
fall seasonal coffee from my favorite coffee roaster.
The folks at Just Coffee Co-op roast the beans longer which brings out the, well, roastier flavors. The darker roasts of cold weather coffees have smokier aromas and more dark chocolate flavors. A slab of Pan
de Muerto and a cup of this stuff will start your day right on a chilly autumn
morning.
I've also begun to drink seasonal beers.
Yesterday I bought a six pack of some pumpkin beer from Milwaukee's Lakefront Brewery.
Most pumpkin
beers are sweet and cloying and strive to mimic pumpkin pie. What I like about
this brew is that it's less sweet and more earthy tasting with a nice ginger
zing. It's a beer that just happens to have the same spices in it that pumpkin
pie does and is not some misguided neo-alchemical attempt to convert the dessert into liquid form.
I hope to
use up a bag of charcoal before the weather makes grilling impossible (or impractical, at least) but have
also been contemplating slightly heavier, more filling types of foods. Being of Eastern
European stock, cooler weather gives me the urge to cook buckwheat groats. I
don't have any memories of being served kasha while I was growing up but it's
possible that I was. I found a recipe for groats with Brussels sprouts and, since my Frau loves the sprouts, I am going to whip up a batch. Or give serious thought to it, at the bare minimum.
I also would
like to make some bigos - Polish hunter's stew. In the past I have made a quick, down & dirty
version of it but perhaps I'll try something a little more traditional with
more treats from the forest like venison and perhaps dried fruit. Stay tuned.
********
One day last
week when I was working from home, I heard a bird call coming in through a
window. It was a loud, stuttering cry that sounded vaguely familiar yet I just could not place it no matter how hard I racked my brain. Wandering over to the window, I looked out at the nearby trees but saw nothing out of
the ordinary. A scan of the canopies revealed the usual suspects: crows and sparrows and finches who were going about their daily
routines of eating, pooping on my car, and chasing one another. I returned to my work.
Almost as soon as I sat down, I heard the call again. Back to the window I went to peruse the scene. Giving up on the trees, I looked elsewhere. It was then that I saw it. There
was a lone Sandhill crane on the corner across the street! I grabbed my camera and
ran downstairs.
My luck was in that day because, when I got
downstairs, the crane had crossed the street and was in our front yard.
The gods
must have been really happy with me because it came right up to our picture
window to peck at some of the bird seed that had fallen from the feeder there. (The
cats love having a feeder right in front of window.) I think that's millet growing there on the left from fallen seeds.
There were
gentle thumps as it pecked at the cover to the window well that had a lot of
feed on it because birds are incredibly messy eaters. Even messier than cats!
Had I not
been so excited at having a crane in the yard and instead been thinking
clearly, I would have gone out the back door and come around to get some
photographs without a window in the way. Our cat Piper was snoozing in her cat
house directly beneath the picture window and I chided her sotto voce for sleeping instead
of checking out the avian visitor.
I wondered where our other cat, Grabby, was as
she loves watching the animals outside while perched in various windows around the house. Sleeping, I figured. She's 13 and
generally hits the rack after breakfast. (She promptly rises at 3:30 and
petitions us for chow even though she knows full well that dinner isn't
served until 5.) I went over to our front door to get a better view of the crane as it had started
walking down the block and found Grabby keeping a close eye on the proceedings.
Sadly, I had
to call into a meeting for work and so ended my bird watching. However, I was
able to hear its resounding call from the window next to my desk for a while before it finally
left the area.
While I am on the subject of avian friends, I
finally managed to get a decent photograph of a blue jay.
Blue jays
are pretty but they're jerks who chase other birds off of our feeder even
though there's plenty of tasty seeds to go around.
********
Several
entries ago, I told of how my Frau and I drove out to the town of Marshall to pay a visit
to the new incarnation of our favorite Mexican restaurant. And, afterwards, we
decided that we would have dinner there the last Tuesday of every month.
On our most
recent visit, we found that there were bags of pears scattered around the joint
with notes attached to them that read "FREE! GRATIS!" Apparently, the
restaurant was given a free case of pears, presumably by their produce vendor,
and was giving them away to customers.
We took a bag. I mean, who doesn't like free produce? At home we pondered just what to
do with them until the internet provided the answer: clafoutis.
The Frau made it. You fan the pear slices out at the bottom of a pie dish and then add a
custard. It was wonderful! She enjoyed it so much, she made a special trip
to the grocery store a couple days later so she could whip up a cherry clafoutis.
********
My latest excursion to the cinema was to see the
Swedish film About Endlessness by Roy Andersson. He is reported to have
said that this is his last movie. I seem to recall that his 2014 film, A
Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, played at the film festival
here several years ago. And his You, the Living is on my To Watch list.
But this was the first time I'd ever seen one of his films.
It's a
series of vignettes that uses a mix of very droll humor and absurdity to
illustrate human existence. Some scenes portray the vagaries of Fate which push
characters to extremes while others lure the viewer into simply observing the
mundane. A few scenes stand out for me.
A priest who
has lost his faith appears multiple times. In one instance he goes to his
medical doctor begging for help but is rejected because it is closing time.
There's pathos here but also some very dark humor.
In another
scene, an immigrant father holds his daughter's corpse. A voice over narrator
informs us that he did so to protect his family's honor but that he had changed
his mind.
The movie is
very interesting stylistically. Each vignette was shot very theatrically with a
completely static camera and there are no cuts. I found that this technique
focused my attention or, at least, provided less distraction. Instead of
feeling that my attention needs to shift from one character to another with
cuts to closeups of various faces, I get the whole scene at once. I was able to
take in facial expressions and observe where people sit or stand in relation to
one another at my leisure. I felt like I was able to watch the scenes unfold at
my own pace rather than being prodded by the editing.
Highly
recommended.
********
Bonus photo:
I got a new phone recently and the camera app has some special effects that you
can add to your photographs. Here's a psychedelic picture of Piper. Imagine, if
you will, some sitar playing in the background.
