You are what you eat

There are some things you don't admit to liking, at least not in sophisticated company.  Like Spam and scrambled eggs...a breakfast treat from the 1950's. I can still taste those ultra-salty fried cubes of "meat" mixed in with the soft eggs!

"Krab" salad

Here in the land of fresh seafood, most people put their noses up at imitation crab meat.  Still, it shows up everywhere in all sorts of things, like expensive California sushi rolls.  OK, I admit-- I'll buy a package occasionally and make a low-cal salad for lunch when I'm home alone. (John wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.)

A food blog described the product as "the pulverized, rubbery remains of a bunch of random fish for the cheap and not particularly discerning amongst us."

Yum.  But surely my crows would eat it?  So I threw a few pieces out on the grass, and by 5 o'clock it was still there, without so much as a peck mark.  They looked, they left. They wouldn't even taste it!

Which gave me pause to think.  Crows are wise. Eating things that carrion birds put their noses up at is probably not a good idea. But Spam is probably a different story altogether.

Giulio Caesare, Bollywood style

David Daniels and Natalie Dessay (Caesar and Cleopatra)

How do you measure time?  Spend five hours in a cramped airplane, and you can travel from Seattle all the way across the country to New York City.  Or, spend the same amount of time in a dark movie theater, and you've watched Handel's opera, Giulio Caesare.

The sandwiches were packed by 8 and the opera started at 9. That would be AM, not PM.  Some people really know how to treat themselves on a rainy Saturday morning.

The critics described this new production as "imaginative, daffy, charming and affecting."  I've never seen an entire Bollywood movie, but I got the idea.  Some of the arias were staged like those funky Indian dance numbers. The costumes?  Well, everything from British military uniforms, Scottish kilts, 1920's American flapper dresses, riding jodhpurs and fancy ball gowns.  With a few pieces of Roman body armor thrown in for good measure. As John likes to say, he didn't realize Handel's masterpiece "needed so much help."

The opera is the famous story about Julius Caesar's conquest of Egypt and Cleopatra.  But you wouldn't know that from the setting, what with servants wheeling in tea sets, blimps hovering over modern warships and a handy pistol to kill the bad guy.  (Not to mention, all the dead come back in time for a happy ending.) 

Cleopatra

So just a few liberties were taken with Handel's Baroque masterpiece.  Still, it was fun to watch. As operas go, this is a very old one.  It was first performed in 1724 and was an instant hit. By the 19th century it had fallen into obscurity, but was revived in the 1930's by young Herbert Von Karajan.  Now Giulio Cesare is considered one of the finest operas ever written in the old form called opera seria. 

If you don't like Baroque music, just run in the opposite direction.  This opera is a long string of arias (granted, very beautiful ones) but if all the "repeats" were taken out of the lyrics and music, the show would be about 35 minutes long.

Can you sit still and enjoy the same words sung over and over for 20 minutes or so? Then you probably also love the Brandenburg Concertos, and would appreciate the many lovely arias of Giulio Ceasare.

Mr. Senesino, 1720

In other ways too, the opera requires a mindset from a different place and time. For example, the role of Julius Caesar is sung by a countertenor.  Yes, that would be a guy with a sweet, falsetto, trilling voice. And if that isn't odd enough, imagine such a voice coming from the mouth of a burley, manly soldier like Caesar.  Here's the creepy part. The role is sung by a countertenor because Handel originally wrote the part for Senesino, his favorite castrato singer. (gulp)

Thankfully, men with such voices also exist in nature.  Although that style of male singing went out of fashion, countertenors like David Daniels are in demand again for all types of classical music.

And forget about Caesar-- remember the big hit "Sherry" sung by the Four Seasons? You get the picture.

Burnt offerings

Oh, yea.

The 70-degree afternoon finally comes when you take the plastic cover off the grill and lift the lid (gasp!) It looks like a neglected science experiment.

Scrape off the mold and crud and "sterilize" on high heat. Then start the summer off right with a couple of big, fatty, juicy rib-eye steaks.  Along with fifty-cent corn on the cob (from Mexico?)  What a wonderful world.

Plenty of time for grilled vegetables and chicken, later...

John James Audubon

1785-1851

Today is John James Audubon's birthday.  It took him eighteen years to create The Birds of America, a book of 435 images, with portraits of every bird then known in the United States – painted and reproduced in life size. 

The book was two feet wide and three feet tall, with hand-colored plates. It is known as the Double Elephant folio, after its double elephant paper size.  Over 50 colorists worked on the drawings in an assembly-line, and the cost of printing the entire work was $115,640 (over $2,000,000 today.)  Audubon was a good salesman with an engaging personality, and the book was paid for in advance by subscriptions, exhibitions, commissions and animal skins, which he hunted and sold.

It is considered the greatest masterpiece of ornithology. In 2010, an original copy of The Birds of American sold in London for $11.5 dollars, a record for any printed work. It was purchased by London book dealer Michael Tollemache, who said, “I think it’s priceless, don’t you?”

To put this in perspective, on the same day a copy of William Shakespeare's 1623 First Folio sold for (just) $2.5 million.

Old dogs, new tricks

Every food culture in the world seems to have a version of stuffed peppers. The Mexicans stuff poblanos and the Thai stuff their hot chilies.  The Indian versions are often filled with potatoes instead of meat and seasoned with complex spices.  The Chinese use shrimp or fish mixed with rice for the stuffing.  Other spiced versions are popular in the Middle East. The Hungarians and Italians love them.  The Sicilians are crazy for them! The old folks there have a slang name that John likes to use (something like bibadetti?) that I can never remember or pronounce correctly.

The Germans?  I'm not so sure...

I think my mom made stuffed peppers, or maybe I'm remembering stuffed cabbage leaves.  But if she did, they would have been green.  Growing up, I don't remember eating a bell pepper that wasn't green. When red ones finally appeared in the grocery store, they were several times more expensive.  Now we can buy beautiful big red peppers for a dollar or less, and they taste so much better-- less harsh and raw. And they don't "stay with you" in the same way.

John gets pretty excited when I make this dinner.  I have the perfect size Le Creuset casserole for three stuffed peppers.  One each for supper, and the third for his lunch the next day.  The filling varies-- this time I used leftover saffron rice and a little hot Italian sausage. A touch of cheese to bind it together.  A sprinkle of breadcrumbs and paprika on top.

For some reason, I always par-boiled the pepper shells before filling them.  An extra, messy step. Why?  Maybe I saw my mom do it--  you cannot "stuff" a crispy leaf of cabbage.

It turns out this was unnecessary all along, because the raw, filled peppers cooked beautifully in the covered casserole.  I took the lid off for 15 minutes at the end so the cheesy tops would brown, and we had a satisfying (almost) vegetarian dinner.

"Broken" tulips

Wild colored tulips like these are called "broken."  They were once infected by a virus that caused the cultivar to "break" its lock on a single color.  The bug caused the bars, stripes and streaks of color on the petals of these fancy tulips.

Rem's Sensaton

No, our garden is not infected with tulip virus. Today, tulips displaying a broken effect are the result of breeding, not disease.  But back in the 1600's, tulips from broken bulbs were highly prized, although the virus so weakened the bulb that only a few varieties of old broken tulips are still in existence. An example is the rare Absalon, which dates from 1780-- it has gold flames against a dark chocolate brown background.

Absalon

Other tulips like the magnificent Semper Augustus are now extinct. During the tulip-mania period they were considered to be the Holy Grail of all flowers.  The pinnacle of perfection. The price for a single Semper Augustus bulb would have been approximately 10,000 guilders.  That exhoribent amount would have purchased a big house on the most fashionable canal in Amsterdam.

Semper Augustus

The virus made it difficult to propagate and the poor bulb eventually withered to nothing - ending the genetic line. The famous, broken-colored Semper August bulb no longer exists. Except for thousands of botanical drawings on the Internet.

Things I love about Trader Joe's

Along with orange muscat champagne vinegar, they sell big basil plants for $2.99 in the spring, brought up on a truck from California in perfect condition. I also bought some tomato starts yesterday at RiteAid, and it made me think of of pizza margherita and salad on the way home. 

 Life is good in Seattle. We're having a mini-heat wave and the temperature might reach 70 (gasp!) tomorrow.  If it gets much warmer, the Northwest heat-weenies will start complaining.

 

Crow love

Last week a pair of crows were courtin' and sparkin' on the arbor in front of the house.  They were so absorbed in each other they didn't even notice when I took this picture through the living room window.

Corvus brachyrhynchos (American crows) have been studied to death by biologists, probably because they are so plentiful and are also intelligent, complex birds. People find them either interesting or else hate them. Hardly anyone "loves" crows.

Seattle is teeming with crows, and during daylight hours our house is under surveillance because I feed them occasionally, and they never forget a free, quality meal. If I throw something on the lawn, it's gone within a minute, even if there are no birds in sight.

But for all the hundreds hanging around the neighborhood, it's rare to see them physically touch each other like that, and even when prize food (like chunks of old stinky cheese) is on the ground they seldom fight. There's a pecking order and they take turns, which reduces conflict and saves energy.

This lovey-dovey behavior was unusual and I did some quick research on one of the many websites about the American crow.  I learned this:  Crow mating takes place on the ground after the male bird makes a display of fluffing his body feathers and bowing while making a rattling song. Then male and female perch together to touch bills tenderly and preen each other's feathers. So-- this was the afterglow.

But here's the interesting part. This behavior is not seen often because crows mate for life. Pairs already mated (think of them as old married folks) don't usually have elaborate courtship displays again. They just get down to family business year after year.

So I ruined the magic as soon as I stepped out on the porch. They broke apart like a pair of guilty teenagers and acted like they were up to nothing at all.

The four seasons

These red tulips look almost like poppies when they flare open in the warm house.

I was only gone five days, but what a change outside-- everything grew by inches. It rained all day yesterday, a nice warmish rain, and other than a trip out to the grocery store I just puttered around the house unpacking and getting caught up on chores. I made a big lasagna for dinner. Like millions of other people, I kept an ear on the news from Boston until the high drama became more tiring than dramatic. How long can you talk about the same thing? 

This picture is from the bedroom window. I really don't deserve these beautiful tulips coming back every year.  They don't get any special treatment, some get sliced in half or accidentally dug up every year, and I usually abuse the bulbs by whacking off the foliage long before it dies back naturally.  I cut big bunches with long stems for the house, also a no-no.

But our oldest, biggest flowers are plain yellow and red-- my favorites. They must be the mongrels of the tulip family because the fancier more expensive varieties I've planted over the years have all died out.

Every April, the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival draws people from around the world. My sister and I went a few years back and had a great time driving around looking at the brilliant fields of flowers. This little corner of Washington state, about 60 miles north of Seattle, has become the national capital of tulips.
Our cool, maritime climate is perfect for bulb growth, which may also be the secret of my lazy success. Tulips love it here.

We're roughly on par with the latitude of Holland and have remarkably similar climates:

Annual Rainfall:
Amsterdam 30.0 inches
Skagit Valley 32.3 inches

Average winter high/low:
Amsterdam 40.3/32.0
Skagit Valley 45.5/33.6

And so on. Basically, we have a maritime climate with chilly (but not freezing) winters that gradually transition into long, cool, wet springs. About as different from the Colorado Rockies as you can imagine. A short plane ride really brought that home yesterday.

Up on Cripple Creek...

View of Cripple Creek from the top of Tenderfoot Hill

Once upon a time I lived in Colorado, but I forgot about "Springtime in the Rockies." Don't like the weather?  Just wait a few hours.  Over my visit we had everything from snow and icy wind to blinding blue sky and sunshine.

Actually the season of "spring" doesn't exist up at the 9,500 foot elevation.  Winter and summer battle it out for a week or so, and by late May summer finally wins.  Even then, snow is not unusual on Memorial Day.

But eventually, the aspen groves will thaw and start to green up, and so the short summer begins. 


This is the same view of town on the morning I left. It was so cold I only rolled down the window for a quick shot.

It was a good, safe trip and I had a wonderful visit with our hearty parents who have made Cripple Creek their home for the past 20 years.  And I lucked out on all my flights, making easy connections and missing the blizzard in Denver by a day. 

As I flew home this afternoon we descended down through the gray clouds into a moist, green and flowering Seattle.

OK. Siri was a helpful traveling companion, a distraction when I got bored, and a fine tool for keeping in touch. But there's only so much picking away you can do on a Smartphone without going cross-eyed. I missed my laptop, and I especially missed my daily writing habit.  But then that's the whole purpose of a sabbatical.  It's good to be back.

1,268 posts later

The Past

Anastasia Markovich 

from, Wiki Commons

Time flies. For my handful of daily followers who have stuck with me through 1,268 (almost) daily posts, thank you from the bottom of my heart.  It means everything to the solitary blogger sitting at the computer with her cup of (Mexican) coffee at 6 am.

OK, speaking of computers. I'm flying to Colorado Springs tomorrow morning to visit my parents and taking sassy Ms. Siri and stuffy Mr. Nook for companions.  The toy travel computer (now pretty much an antique) is staying home in the drawer.  I'm telling you this only because Feathers and Flowers won't be updated for a few days. 

Yes, I probably could write and post from the iPhone on-the-go, but I don't trust my clumsy finger not to accidentally tap and delete all 1,268 posts, or do something even worse.   So it will be a blogging sabbatical for me, and perhaps a break for you, too.

I'll be back in Seattle next Thursday, and hopefully to blue skies. The weather has turned cold, wet and miserable here.  In the Colorado mountains, snow showers are predicted for all of next week. Oh boy.

If you miss me, CLICK HERE for a live camera view of downtown Cripple Creek.  That big gray lump on the sidewalk might be me in my down coat.

Love you, and Ciao for now!

Drugs of choice

Let's see...which would I rather give up, if I really had to? Morning coffee at 6 am, or wine at 5 pm? That would be a tough choice, and without those tasty mood-enhancing substances, blogging would probably grind to a halt around here.  Special thanks to Dan and Becky in Ohio for sending us a nice stash of Mexican coffee yesterday! 

Things bright and beautiful

My niece April and her husband Jordan had a baby boy early this morning.  His name is Cody Harrison, and he weighed in at 8 pounds 11 ounces.   Congratulations to the family in Medford.   Hayden has a little brother now.

Between us, my sister and I now have 6 grandkids!  Wow.  I have Nova and Maya and she has the boys: Sam, William, Hayden and Baby Cody.  I'll look forward to the day when we can finally get the cousins together.

It poured rain all morning, but the flowers sure sparkled when the sun came out this afternoon. I'm thinking of you dear April, on this bright and happy spring day.

Where are the swallows?

It rained over two inches in Seattle this past weekend, making it the wettest April weekend since they started keeping records at Sea-Tac Airport in 1948.  If you flew here from say...Colorado, getting off the plane would be like opening that door to the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz movie.  So green it almost hurts your eyes.

Take your pick of weather across the country this morning-- warm in the East, a blizzard in Colorado, hot winds in California and tornadoes slashing across the plains.  It's spring.

Speaking of that, I've been watching for the first swallows out at the barn. It isn't really spring until they get here, all the way up from Central America.  Only the house sparrows are messing around their old nests in the barn rafters.  Are they late? We had to put the winter blankets back on the cold, muddy horses. I'm cooking bean soup this morning with the leftover Easter ham bone.  We're still on winter rations.

Artists and friends

Rembrandt's Portrait of the Artist, 1665

On Sunday we pulled ourselves out of the house early in the pouring rain. A good day for museums.  The Seattle Art Museum has The Treasures of Kenwood House going on right now, an exceptional collection of old master paintings touring America for the first time.

Kenwood House was a private mansion on the outskirts of  London. Maybe it's under renovation and so the paintings are temporarily let out of the country.  Anyway, they once belonged to Edward Guinness (of beer fame) and were donated to Great Britain, including Rembrandt's most famous and priceless self-portrait.

There were also Dutch masterpieces and portraits of European people young and old, snooty and sweet, humble and rich.  Along with their animals. I love looking at portrait art. (Highly paid artists can be so sly.)

But how about this strange one, called Two Girls Dressing a a Kitten by Candlelight?
 Click here to read the funny irreverent captions from The Stranger, a Seattle weekly newspaper.

Nicolai Feschin, 1881-1955

After that, we drove up the hill to the Frye Art Musem to have lunch in the cafe and see the special Fechin exhibit.  John and I have a small connection with this artist that we treasure. And of course, we like his art. 

When Fechin burst on the Russian art scene, he was described as having a "barbaric mastery of form and color."  The only way to appreciate the variety and impact of his work is to see a large number of his paintings in one place.

It's a shame more people haven't heard of him because he's considered one of the most important portrait painters of the 20th century.  The Frye Museum has a large collection of Feschin art, and they also borrowed works from all over the U.S. and Russia for this special exhibit.

Fechin House, Taos New Mexico

Fechin lived in Taos from 1927-1933.  The paintings he did there of Native Americans and the New Mexico desert are considered among his best works.  But the Taos house he remodeled and enlarged for his family was also a work of art. He was highly skilled in metal and wood-working.

After divorcing his wife and leaving Taos (how could he bear it?) Fechin lived out the rest of his life in California.

In the 1970's, his daughter Eya returned to Taos and restored her family home. It opened to the public in 1981.  John and I had a memorable trip to New Mexico in the mid-1990's, and we stayed at the lovely Fechin Inn in Taos and toured the Fechin House, then called the Fechin Institute.

Words don't do justice to this exquisite house, with an artist's touch in the smallest details.  Anyway, while I was poking around in the garden, John ran into a friendly elderly lady in the kitchen.  He said they chatted for a while, and she introduced herself as Eya.

After Eya died in 2002, the house passed on to her daughter who sold it to a private foundation. It is now operated as The Taos Museum of Art for Artists and Their Patrons.  The Fechin House is worth a trip to this lovely, tucked away corner of the West. I hope to go back again someday.

Eya Fechin 

The bloom of time

The roof of our old gazebo looked very wabi-sabi in the rain yesterday. The "bloom of time" is on many things around this place, including the inhabitants.

It's been raining for two days, with no end in sight. You are used to me complaining about the rain, but this is a warmish, soaking rain that the plants love. Although we could do without the blustery wind this morning.

The tulips are looking for a little sun to pop open. There seem to be more than ever-- what a gift. Some of the fancier varieties peter out after the first year, but the cheaper yellow and red ones come back and even seem to multiply. 

Speaking of coming back, today the family will be through Seattle again on their way home from the coast.  I took a turkey out of the freezer this week-- which is sounding like a pretty good dinner on a wet and windy spring night.