Garlic Scapes

Last Saturday, I was pleased to drag Calli, Jody, and Zack to the farmer's market. We started with crepes at Bradbury's, walked around the square, stopped in at Fromagination, found ourselves viewing a naked bike ride, and then went to Pizza Brutta for lunch. I think we all found some things to enjoy during the day:
I picked up garlic scapes, green onions, and three tomatoes, along with three cheeses from Fromagination.
Calli gets to enjoy whatever comes out of those ingredients, plus the enjoyment of a beautiful morning. Jody and Zack both said hello to every puppy/dog in the downtown area in addition to tasting/buying some delicious cheeses from Fromagination.

tomato, scapes, and gouda

On Monday, I made scape pesto by blending together half of the garlic scapes, a couple of basil leaves, pine nuts, olive oil, and parmesan cheese. So far, I've only used the pesto as a spread on grilled cheese sandwiches...three times.


I don't care that I have to brush my teeth after eating one every time. It is absolutely worth it.


I have a theory (which is practically fact) that when the Israelites were eating manna in the desert, it was in the form of grilled cheese. As a Wisconsinite who most definitely does not keep kosher, manna ideally would be grilled cheese with bacon. Whatever.

Morels

My favorite thing about Madison is the Dane County Farmer's Market. So far this year, I've been lucky enough to go walk around the square and get some amazing produce on several different occasions.

Back around Mother's Day, I snagged some morels. I didn't do much to them besides saute them in butter. They were delicious.

"what are these? are they for me?"

After I rescued the mushrooms from Dinah, I took half of them home as a quasi-mother's day gift. The four of us had a very spring lunch of grilled trout, sauteed morels, and an asparagus flatbread.

Wall Map Update

I've been making progress on my giant wall map project lately. I had finished the sketching last spring, but then let the momentum die away. However, I have now finished painting the oceans on 7 of the 20 panels - it looks pretty decent. I'm beginning to worry that I'm never going to live in a place with a wall big enough to handle this thing, but that is a problem for later.

You can see that I've finished the Southern Ocean around Antarctica and almost all of the water surrounding South America.


Here you can see the eastern part of Antarctica and Australia just beginning to show up. New Zealand sure looks different than most maps' representations of it; I think that is due to a combination of the map projection I based this on and my own scaling issues. Whatever, it's art. If I ever have to find my way to New Zealand using only this wall map, there are a lot of things going wrong in the world.

I think that my favorite part of the map so far is either the Antarctic Peninsula or the Amazon River Delta in Brazil.

...well, I am also partial to the giant world-crushing cat in this picture.

Hiatus

The WI highway beer project has been put on a (temporary?) hiatus for an indeterminate amount of time. Since my last foray into the field, there has been an increase in Madison-based work for the Historical Society. We've also hired a bunch of new archaeologists, so I've been hanging out downtown for the last couple of weeks. I don't find a lot of empty beer cans on the sides of hallways down in the basement, so the project has been shelved. For now.