Category: Irondequoit Melon

How did the eggplant get its name? Maybe the fruit at one time, long before gene splicing, was no bigger that an egg. It is a beautiful plant. The leaves are like giant oak leaves and the flowers are a pretty light purple. And then the fruit is so dramatic and rich looking. I found a simple recipe in a Spanish cookbook that calls for six baby eggplants. I brought three good sized ones up from the garden and cubed them and tossed them with a mortar mixture of cumin, paprika, parsley, garlic and olive oil before baking them on a cookie sheet.

We have a dozen tomatoe plants and each plant has produced at least a dozen tomatoes. Too many to count. We picked a few bags worth and weighed them before making sauce. We had thirty pounds! We threw some of our kale in, a pile of basil and jalapeños from the garden, parsley from our neighbor’s garden, carrots, celery and fifteen or so gloves of garlic. We let it simmer all day and left it on the stove to cool down overnight.

Wisner Road used to lead right into the park. This barrier wasn’t here. You could continue through the park on Zoo Road and come out on Lakeshore Boulevard and I’ll bet it was quite a short cut. As it stands, it’s a deadend and you have to drive around the park. A brilliant move on someone’s part because it keeps all that traffic out of the park.

When we moved here we were told this part of the park is a hangout for gay hookups and there has always been plenty of tiny drug bags on the ground, not that those two things go together. It is mostly populated by dog walkers, people who drive to the park and let their dog run free despite the sign that reads, “Dogs Must Be On Leash.” I mention these infractions because the lettering on the sign and the road in front of it reads like someone is upset by something the police did. Probably not the dog walkers.

A fellow named John May wrote a letter to the editor that was published in today’s New York Times, a well written letter in response to the Sunday article about how lies don’t really matter anymore when it comes to politicians. With a name like that I didn’t think it could possibly be the John May in our painting class but when he walked in tonight he was wearing an especially large smile.

About one or two times a year we go down to the lake for an ice cream. I say “down” because it is downhill, otherwise we’d be underwater, but it is really “up” if your compass is working. We like the Chocolate Almond custard at “Don’s Original. If we were here for ground rounds we’d be next door at Viv & Irv’s.

When a restaurant call’s itself “Original’ it only calls attention to the fact that there is some shaky history to the lineage and I don’t claim to know the rundown but I vividly remember going with my dad to Don & Bob’s on Monroe Avenue where we’d pick up burgers and fries for the whole family and drive back home as quickly as possible while the car filled with the aroma of those thin, flat patties that hung over the edge the bun by an inch or so. It was beautiful torture. Jeff Springut from the Red Creek took the place over and ran it into the ground.

There is good reason why Sea Breeze Amusement Park used to call itself “Dreamland.” Sea Breeze, a tiny enclave at the end of Culver Road is nothing but dreamy. We walked out on the pier while we ate our custard and felt like we were much more than a mile from home.

There’s always more photos over here.

It was such a delight to hear Louise Wareham Leonard read at Writers & Books last night. I’m still getting over it. The Performance Space there is dramatic. Stadium style seating, theatrical lighting and Louise at the podium with a short stack of pages. There is a “this better be good” vibe to the setting and Louise delivered in rather surprising fashion, surprising only because hearing her read something of hers I had already read brings it to a near boil.

She read from four of her books, some still in progress, and I particularly liked her comments as introduced a piece from “Fiery World,” the first chapter of which is published in this month’s Rochester POST magazine. The book is set in Durand Eastman’s Arboretum, “a spectacularily beautiful place that none goes to.” “I almost don’t even want to tell you about it.”

We were attempting to call up the tv show “Fargo’ with our new TW “On Demand” box when we came across the public access channel, something we had never seen before. A guy with the worst crop of jet black hair on top of mismatched sideburns was addressing a woman about a driveway variance and the subhead read “66 Wisner Road,” a road that is only a block from us. This was real local tv and it was better than Fargo.

The gentleman who lives on a corner lot, across the street from the woman was petitioning the town to let him add a second driveway, one on each street of the corner, because he has so many cars. He works nights and his girlfriend’s kids moved in with them and they come home at different times and he has to wake up and move his car so he can out and it would be so much easier if he could just put another driveway in – something like that. This was riveting stuff.

The next guy up wanted to build a six foot fence around his house in order to park and hide his RV next to the garage. The town only likes to see four foot fences close to the street. The guy after that took the cake. He and his wife had five cars between the two of them and in the next couple of year two of his kids will have their own car so that would be seven vehicles and he wanted to widen his driveway by eighteen feet or something. The town has a regulation that limits the percentage of your lot that you can pave to 35 and they weren’t buying his argument.

Abby scored two goals this afternoon.

I met Teddy on the morning of the 5th, one day after he apparently disappeared at Target on East Ridge Road. He was right at my door and would have come in if I had opened it but I was afraid to do so. Our white cat, who had just gently woken me, as is her habit, was right at my feet and there would have been an ugly confrontation.

It was snowing that day and as Teddy ran off I could see tiny snow balls clinging to the poodle hair on her legs like she had been traipsing through the snow all night. Target is not that close to us either so I felt bad when I saw this sign today.

I helped our neighbor Rick bring chairs upstairs for his house concert tonight, My Darling Clementine, an English duo doing George and Tammy style country. When you like something the first time around there is no going back so we might stay home. I’m kinda tired from last night’s art opening. I’m so happy so many people came out to see my father and brother’s stuff. There were no red dots on the wall at the end of the night but there was plenty of good talk.

I may have done this same post this last year. I’m afraid to look. I do know the Church of the Transfiguration had the same plywood nativity scene on display and I can’t imagine me not wanting to to photograph it. I would like to believe this spot on Culver Road is the exact spot where the young baby Jesus was born.

The oversize ballot, maybe 16 by 9 inches, that we filled out yesterday at the special election at Christ the King School was absurd. When I say “filled out” I mean we used a Sharpie to fill in one circle that was no more than an inch in diameter. And to do so we had to wait in a long line, but I’m not complaining. At issue was whether the Town of Irondequoit should consolidate the two libraries by building a new bigger library next to the Town Hall on property that the town already owns.

The thing that makes this absurd is that the town already approved the plan in a special election held last year. They failed to properly complete an environmental impact study and the no tax/no services crowd seized the opportunity to force another election. I’m quite certain this kind of drama plays out in various ways all across the country. I just want a better fine arts section.

Only the committed ventured out on such a snowy day and getting so close to West Irondequoit gave us the opportunity to stop into Atlas Eats on the very northern end of Clinton Avenue. Their bowls of Kimchee Fried Rice with Tofu and cilantro are out of this world, that is off any map you’ll find on the walls of the restaurant.

It was cold today as we walked by the marsh down on Hoffman Road, a magical spot spoiled only by the albatross of a house on top of the steep hill overlooking the wetlands. Is it ok for me to wish that someone would torch it? It was another neighbor who said, “I wish someone would torch it.” I won’t mention her name, I’m just seconding the motion.

No one lives there, the previous owner, who also owns at least ten houses in the city, and we only know this because we saw his name listed in the paper among those who owed back taxes on their property, walked away from it for some reason. The town should never have let him build there since he violated every set-back/steep-slope regulation on their books but that was another administration, Schantz, and they were probably desperate to get more property on their tax rolls.

The guy who had this house built couldn’t even engineer a driveway that would allow him to drive up to his garage. They would be able to pull a feat like this off in Bel Air where swimming pools with glass walls hang out over cliffs and money is no obstacle but this guy went to court with his neighbor when he tried to snag a bit of his neighbor’s property in order to negotiate a switchback driveway up to his house. Needless to say, he lost and now we’re stuck looking at an ugly-ass, abandoned house. The siding is falling off and the trim around the garage door is rotted. You could put your fist through the wood. I try not to look at it.

Heavy rains in the Spring and Fall wash over the house and race down the hillside so erosion may someday allow the marsh to swallow up the house.

The deer are out of control around here but there is one less because my brother hit one a few nights ago. He did a few thousand dollars worth of damage to his vehicle. The ten point buck in the photo above comes by our place every day. When he’s not chasing women he likes to rub his antlers on our trees. The trees can’t live without their bark.