Heat, Holidays, and The Week That Was

I've been feeling stretched thin lately and as a result, not only are blog posts far and few between - I also haven't been taking much for pictures. When I plugged in my camera this morning to see what I had at my disposal if I were to actually write a post, I was a little surprised by the lack of pictures at my disposal to illustrate my points.

Let's see. . . . There's this picture of a tadpole which is totally unrelated to anything I'd planned to write about . . . .

I have a 12-year-old volunteer at work. He's volunteering through a community program which will award him with some sort of cultural/learning prize (a ski pass, art classes, or music lessons, etc.) if he volunteers so many hours at a non-profit organization in the community this summer. One thing he loves to do is take pictures on the museum grounds (which we can then use for promotion purposes) and he's a little obsessed with the tadpoles in the ditch beside the driveway. It's hard to tell in the above picture, but those guys are huge. I think they just might be bullfrog tadpoles because I always hear a bullfrog twanging away on his banjo whenever I walk up the driveway.

On Tuesday, Andy and I headed out a little canoeing adventure. Some friends were spending a couple nights in the Boundary Waters, so we paddled out to spend the day with them. Despite the picture below, we did not catch a single fish and instead spent most of the day lounging around the campsite as the temperature climbed higher and higher. It's been consistently in the upper 80s and even in the 90s these last few days. Not nearly as hot as elsewhere in the country, but enough to make these northern Minnesotans feel like death warmed over.

Did everyone have a good Fourth of July? We had a less than celebratory day since we both worked and honestly, the Fourth of July celebration in town just isn't worth the two-hour round trip drive. The parade is so small it goes around the block (yes, block is singular) twice to make it last nearly 10 minutes. The fireworks are usually also a rather pithy affair. So instead we stayed home and watched Mother Nature's own fireworks - we had quite the doozy of thunderstorm roll in in the late afternoon.

Remember Slug watch(!)? We've been having problems with some of our potato plants being cut off at the base. Last night, Andy and I headed out with flashlights to see if we could find the nocturnal pest that's been after our potatoes. I knew slugs were a risk when we planted the potatoes in straw, but I naively hoped  we'd dodge that bullet. Ah well, hopefully we've caught it soon enough to save at least a few of the plants.

What's new in your neck of the woods?

 

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Bad Life Choices = Tasty Results

Yesterday I made a quick run to town to do some banking, grab some groceries and do a quick load of laundry. When the clothes were about halfway through their trip through the dryer, I decided I was tired of waiting around for them, so I tossed them into the laundry bag, figuring I hang them up to air-dry once I got home. After all, it had been a sunny, balmy early June morning. But no sooner had I gotten the clothesline strung between the backyard trees, then I heard a deep rumble of thunder and spied some ominous thunderheads moving in from the west. Bad life choice!

But while the clothes sat in a damp heap near the front door and the lightning flashed sideways across the bay and rain splattered the windows, I took a moment to putter around quietly in the kitchen by myself.

We've been really trying to up our veggie consumption lately and that means a lot of salad. Which consequently means we've been going through a lot more salad dressing. And I had a homemade epiphany the other day when I was standing in front of the salad dressing aisle. Suddenly it seemed so silly that I was paying for prepaid dressings full of who-knows-what, when I had the basic ingredients for salad dressing (namely: oil and vinegar) in my pantry at all times and could probably make my salad dressings for half the cost of the pre-made guys.

So I pulled out a cookbook for one of our well-known local restaurants (one which I haven't visited since my brother broke up with the proprietor's daughter . . . oh small towns!) and whipped up two batches of salad dressings. The vinaigrette took less than five minutes to make and the creamy dressing didn't take much longer. It's nice to know exactly what's going into my salad dressing and not have weird ingredients like food dyes, xantham gums, and preservatives in the mix. In fact, in place of the weird ingredients, I was able to use some locally sourced ingredients (yay maple syrup!) and put the dressings in some upcycled containers. Success!

Maple Mustard

Bleu Cheese

Also, how cool is that handy-dandy lid for the Mason jar? It's called a ReCap  and is brand spanking new product (USA made!) from a company that actually got its start from some Kickstarter funding. Despite being a pretty prolific canner, I always have quite a few empty Mason jars rattling around the kitchen, so I'm pretty excited to have an easy way to put those unsealed jars to good use.

By the way, the sun totally came out today and while the clothes were drying merrily on the clothesline, Andy and I were doing this:

We canoed down to a hidden waterfall that's gushing with all of our recent rainfall, then paddled around, trying to locate some of the old homestead spots on the lake.

Speaking of homesteads, the gardening is 98% planted now. Pictures coming soon!

 

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We Be Jammin'

No doubt, you've surmised that it's berry season here at Of Woods and Words. Or, as I like to call it . . . "the most wonderful time of the year."Nearly every evening for the last week, I've headed out with my berry picking bucket (aka, a lidded Tupperware container) and have been steadily amassing berries. With two gallons of berries in the freezer, one pie made, and a batch of blueberry vinegar steeping away in the corner, it was time to focus berry picking efforts on restocking the jam pantry.   

Although there are berries galore in the woods, this year, as my scrapped-up shins can attest to, you have to work a little harder to get them. Last year the berries seemed to favor easily accessible open fields. This year, they've tucked themselves away at the top of granite cliffs and in crevices. They're as big and juicy as ever, but sometimes I feel like I could use shin guards. . . or climbing gear. It's been handy to have various watercraft at our disposal to use in this year's berry picking adventures. This is probably just classic, "the grass is always greener on the other side" but I swear the biggest, best berries live down the lake, where you have to paddle or motor to them.   

We took out the canoe on a nearby creek on Tuesday. We found a sandy beach, a ton of berries (and people . . . ah, wilderness!), and towards the end of our time out, we meandered down the river until we reached some rapids. We forded the river, which forms the border between the U.S. and Canada, and found the mother load of berries. With no container on me other than my camera case, I quickly filled up the case with big Canadian blueberries in about five minutes. Best use of my remote area border crossing pass ever.

This past Christmas, I received not one, but two water bath canners. (One got returned . . . there may be no such thing as too many blueberries, but there is such a thing as one too many water bath canners.) I'm feel blessed to have so many people who encourage my berry-picking obsession and on Tuesday evening I got to test out the canner for the first time. There were some nasty smells for a while as the water heated up and the canner burned off some paint/finish fumes.

But in the end, it did a great job of transforming this:

Into this:

Five pints of blueberry/raspberry jam.

Last night, I put up another three pints of straight-up blueberry jam. I've become enamored with the blog "Food in Jars" which could mean very good things for our winter pantry and very bad things for my social life/writing life/anything but domestic goddess life. More canning adventures to come soon!

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Toasted

We have a heat index warming today that the index may reach 110 today. That's less than great news for this gal who'd prefer to have summer highs between 65 and 70 degrees, especially since I'm already feeling a little toasted.

There's no reason to subject you to photos of my sunburn, but I can assure you that despite quite liberal sunscreen application on Wednesday, there are certain strips of skin -- my forearms and a patch above my back waistline -- that are lovely shades of painful fluorescent. Nothing I can do now but keep the aloe vera close at hand. The burns' sting seem to have diminished significantly overnight and I'm hoping that means I'll feel a little more with it today. It always amazes me just how much a day in the full sun can take out of you. Mix a full day of sun with a sense of being overwhelmed by laundry, articles, and various other obligations and Wednesday evening was one cranky, emotional mess.

Still, the pre-toasted part of the day was pretty darn nice. Andy and I headed down the lake for a day's paddle. I think the high temp was somewhere in the low 70s: no absurdly high heat indexes here! At least not yet . . .

We found our first loon chicks of the year, just as we were turning the corner into the Boundary Waters.

Twins!

Another feathered friend followed us for a while once we reached the far end of the lake and started heading up the river that connects the lake we live on to the next lake.

This little duck (she didn't even have full wings yet) stayed close by the entire time we were on the river, even when we made a lengthy stop halfway upstream to do some catch and release fishing. There were a ton of hungry bass hanging out in the river, just waiting to grab our night crawlers.

After the fish had several bites of yummy worm and we'd had a bite of lunch ourselves (not of yummy worm), we headed on to the next lake. Why both portaging when you can just press on upstream through the river?

The sunburn no doubt happened on our return trip to the cabin. Turns out SPF 45 just doesn't hold for six hours and several miles of paddling. As the French would say: "Eh bien." Something tells me that as the temperature soars these next few days, I'll soon be wishing I was back in the river, feeling the cool current tug and swirl around my ankles.

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Sailing Down the River

Well, not really "sailing" or a "river" for that matter, but on Saturday Andy and I decided we'd had it with the whole ice thing and headed for open water. The creek that runs into the lake we live on has been open for a few weeks now and has slowly been draining into the lake. It's pretty funny to watch the water level on the lake rise while it's still ice covered: as rocks that were exposed all winter become submerged, little rings of ice pop up over the top of the rock.

Anyway, back to Saturday's adventure . . . we grabbed the old beater canoe, strapped it to the top of the truck and headed down the road a piece to put in on the creek.

As we started our paddle down the meandering stream, we found a beaverhouse along the shoreline. I suspect the beavers who live in that house are pretty industrious: during the course of the short paddle, we had to pull the canoe over two beaver dams!

There was just a skim of ice left in some of the creek's shady bends, which made Mr. and Mrs. Duck very happy.

The ducks weren't so happy about having to share the creek with a couple of canoeists though. You could almost hear them thinking every time we got too close and they had to fly off: "What do you have to do to get some peace and quiet around here?!"

The creek runs straight through the 2007 wildfire area and it was truly to heartwarming to see a blanket of baby jack pine trees poking up along the shoreline. 

Just before we got to the mother of all beaver dams, we found an upside down forest reflected back at us.

Andy scoped the beaver dam out, but in the end we decided to turn back. It had started to rain and this way we have an excuse/reason to paddle the rest of the creek some other day.

A dose of summertime fun was just what was needed to break my spring fever!

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