Category: Dear Diary

I spotted two giant puffballs down in the woods while riding by on my bicycle and mentioned them to Shelley when I got back to the house. I knew she knows her mushrooms. They have been eating mushrooms all summer up in Adirondacks. We hiked down across the creek and over to where I had seen them but they were a little past prime. We spotted five or six different varieties along the way but nothing for dinner. I feel better getting my mushrooms from Wegmans.

How this all fits together, I’m not sure. Maybe it doesn’t. We decided to eat out tonight but we wanted to go somewhere close. There’s Osteria overlooking the lake and Shamrock Jack’s and Churi’s Thai food or in the other direction Monte Alban or the new Puerto Rican spot or Pasta Villa. Stop. The citadel of Italian food in Rochester with the dining room frozen in in 1975 with the Ramon Santiago prints on the wall and mirror trim and marble wallpaper with two loud air conditioners cranking. We’re there. Gnocchi with greens and beans and Chicken Picata, Chianti, Dean Martin music, the painting in the bar of the Guido family owners!

On the way home we got stuck at the intersection on Culver where the owner has a couple of pressure treated picnic tables that he is trying to sell for 175 bucks each. This place is a marvel of whacked out tackiness, an American flag on the pole, a circular driveway with at least three cars in it at all times including a shiny black, Chevy 4-door Silverado pick up truck, died black wood chips in the circle and potted marigolds with an angel statue holding out an empty bowl, a deck on the front of the house with an umbrella table. Is it any wonder they have teenage age son running around with a trench coat and long died black hair in the middle of summer?

This Witch-hazel, along the road leading into Durand Eastman Park, is in full bloom now. Your nose detects it before your eyes but it but it is not as fragrant as the winter Witch-hazel which bloomed, like a miracle, up in the park in February. Still to come is the Witch-hazel that will blossom to much less fanfare in our back yard in the Fall. They remind me of Geri McCormick’s paintings.

One of our neighbors down the street emailed us about some community pool business and she refered to “this awful cold weather” we’ve been having. We had just returned from a ski through the woods and down to the lake and we thought the weather was perfect. But then Mike Deming used to chide me that I’m a “Glass half full kind of guy” so I would see it that way. OK, it was fifteen degrees but the sun was out (click photo for full shot) and the snow was fresh and crisp. In fact it glistened.

The gallery space at High Falls in the shadow of Eastman Kodak’s world headquarters was home to an art supply trade show yesterday. Rochester Art Supply is Amazon’s art vendor so they buy in bulk and Mike, the owner, had some barn-burner prices on canvas and paint and brushes so I bought some of each. You were supposed to pre-register for the seminars that ran throughout the day but we hung around the entrance to a watercolor demonstration and they waved us in. Canada’s “Windsor & Newton Artist-in-Residence ” passed around some near photographic prints of landscapes he had painted but didn’t spend any time on composition or expression or any of those sort of painterly concerns.

He started with the composition of paint, pigment, binder and medium. Watercolor is uses gum Arabic as a binder between the pigment and water. All of the gum Arabic comes from Libya and for a few years the art world was panicking because of the instability there. He advised against re-wetting water color from the tube and seemed to recommend what he called pan paints. He demonstrated how much water sable brushes hold but he warned that real sable brushes are getting more expensive because the hair on a sable is not as long as it used to be because of global warming. He showed us a Windsor Newton Series 7 Number 10 brush that lists for $400. And if you spring for a good brush he said, “don’t use it with acrylic or ink.”

I almost forgot I had a blog. I haven’t been here in a few days. Too much work. Don’t call us. We’re too busy.

We celebrated the Autumnal Equinox in style last night. I think it was a full moon, it looked it. We fired up our Home Depot chiminea and burnt some scrap wood from the garage. It was mostly pine but there was some redwood and cedar scraps from various home improvement projects. It got too hot out there for a while. There is a whole ‘nother world in that chiminea. We were transfixed.

I suspect Martin eats out more than he eats in but I know he is a great cook. We’ve had his homemade pizzas and olive salad and things I can’t remember right now. He emailed us that he and Boo had bought thirty pounds of tomatoes at the public market and made sauce by baking the tomatoes. We have always par-boiled the tomatoes and then simmered the sauce for most of the day so we were intrigued by the baking approach. We grow tomatoes in the gardens of the neighbors on either side of us. We don’t have enough sun on our property to grow them. In fact I only have to mow our lawn twice a year because it just doesn’t get enough light to grow.

We picked both gardens clean and split the tomatoes in half as Martin suggested. Here’s his recipe:
Cut in half and put in roasting pans with chopped onion, garlic, some with red peppers and olive oil, baked for 3 hours, pull the skins off and blend. We started at 400 for an hour then lowered to 350. They get real juicy at first then the juice starts to evaporate. When most of it is gone take them out and let them cool. We dug in and slipped the skins off before blending them and putting them in freezer bags with a funnel. We put sliced carrots in some batches- they sweeten it a bit. Don’t bother with Basil, the flavor disappears almost as soon as you put it in so it should never be added until you’re ready to eat.

I was working out in the tomatoes cooked down and the whole neighborhood smelled like an Italian restaurant. We started to pull the skins off and then bagged that idea. And we didn’t blend them either. It almost like stewed tomatoes but chunky and rich. The next night I baked a big eggplant at 400 for about an hour and then peeled and sliced it. I mixed it in with the sauce and we served it over whole wheat pasta.