Renae here with an other weather-inappropriate recipe. Actually, that’s not true. Although a nice hot bowl of soup is probably not the most tempting-sounding dish when it’s 100-freaking-degrees out, based on its ingredients – garlic scapes, fresh garlic, new potatoes – this soup is kind of late-spring-to-the-max. One year it’s impossible to find garlic scapes anywhere but the Korean grocery store (where they go by the name “garlic stems”), the next, all the farmers have them at the market, for week after week!

Garlic Scape Soup

1 medium onion, chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 bunch garlic scapes, chopped
1 lb new potatoes, chopped
6 cups vegan broth or water + bouillon
1 Tbsp soy sauce
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
optional toppings: drizzle of a flavored oil you like, thinly sliced scallions, vegan cheese shreds, vegan bacon bits, croutons, fried onions or scallions, fresh herbs

My farmers market had fresh garlic – normal cloves of garlic that hadn’t yet been dried – which is what I used. It doesn’t keep as long as your standard dried head of garlic, but it’s an interesting change of pace. I can’t decide if it tastes more or less pungent than the freshest dried garlic, although it’s definitely more flavorful than garlic that has been around too long. It really just seems to taste “fresher” (some help I am, right?). The big difference is just that instead of peeling off thin, dry, papery layers to get to each clove, you peel off thicker, wetter layers until you get to the point you can squeeze each bulb out. You can use whatever kind of garlic strikes your fancy, however.

Heat some oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat. Add the onion and cook until soft, then add the minced or pressed garlic and the garlic scapes and cook for another minute or two. If necessary and desired, you can deglaze the pot with a bit of white wine. Then add the potatoes, broth, and soy sauce. Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 30 minutes or until the potatoes are soft. Puree with an immersion blender. (Or let it cool a bit and puree in small batches in a regular blender. I, however, don’t trust hot liquids in blenders.) Adjust seasonings with salt and pepper. If desired, top with some stuff. Pictured are Daiya cheddar “cheese” shreds, scallions, and vegan bacon bits.

Most of you probably can’t tell because I’ve never put nearly the amount of effort I should be into taking my food pictures, but today’s food pictures are even lower quality than usual. That’s because I took them at work with my phone. I devoured the soup too quickly when I made it for dinner Tuesday night to take a picture, so I took a picture of the leftovers when I had them for lunch at work today. The sad thing is I had my real camera with me – it generally goes wherever I go – but when I went to take the picture, I realized I’d left the battery in the charger at home. AND I’d left all the spare batteries in my other camera bag.

I’ll use this as an opportunity to proselytize about taking time out for lunch at work, though. I know you aren’t supposed to eat at your desk because it’s good to get up, get out, and enjoy a change of scenery somewhere you can’t be tempted to do work while you eat, but we’re a fairly small business without a cafeteria or other appropriate eating place. I could have gone outside, but did I mention it’s 100 degrees outside? Lugging a bowl of hot soup down 8 flights of stairs to eat it under the blazing sun just didn’t seem practical. There is a small table in the kitchen, but eating there just invites everyone who uses the kitchen to talk to you and I don’t like talking to people during my lunch. I like eating my lunch during my lunch. And reading books. So I do eat at my desk, but I log out of the computer, stick my nose in a book, and glare at anyone that happens to drop by to ask me something until they back off and agree to come back later. And I’m a huge fan of making my lunches as nice as I can as a little treat for myself. I usually eat leftovers, so sometimes my lunch is just not that pretty, but I try to dress them up when I can. Today right after lunch I had to do a demo for an application I wrote and I hate, hate, hate, hate, HATE public speaking. However, having a pleasant lunch with a nicely-topped bowl of soup (and, importantly, reading a book instead of freaking out) right before the demo chilled me out and guess what? I didn’t even have one of my usual public-speaking dry-throat choking spells!

In photography news, the other week I went to Red Rock Wilderness Overlook for the first time. I knew it was a small park but I was thinking maybe because it isn’t very popular, I’d run into more wildlife. I also thought it would have nice views of the Potomac. Unfortunately, I’ve been spoiled by the Potomac view at Great Falls so my expectations were set way too high. It was an easy fraction of a mile to the overlook, but all it overlooked was a very still, very brown, rather boring Potomac, partially obscured by a tall fence with lots of “NO ENTRY BEYOND THIS POINT” signs. No rushing falls, no rapids, no interesting rocks, no hawks flying overhead. No crowds of people, sure (mine was the only car in the parking lot), but also no signs of wildlife other than a squirrel or two.

It was kind of boring. What there were, however, were a few agreeable damselflies, who make much better photography sitters than dragonflies. The full size versions of these are much better so I’ve made these two pictures clickable if you are interested.

A slightly different variety. Their face are like robots! They’re fascinating. In real life, this damselfly was about an inch and a half from end to end. They are very tiny; these macro shots exaggerate their size. I think that’s why their little robot faces are so amazing to me – they are little bigger than the head of a pin.

Other than friendly damselflies, the one interesting thing about Red Rock is the ruins that surround the parking lot. They were part of the farm that used to be there 150 years ago. What I assume is the original farmhouse is also still there but it’s not in ruins and in fact is inhabited and private property. So you sort of have to walk through these people’s back yard to get to the trails.

This, I think, was the well house.

One room of the two-room granary:

Outside of the two-room granary:

The ice house is located away from the other ruins and is instead behind the farmhouse.

There was a man working in his garden behind the farmhouse while I was there, which made me feel a little tresspass-y, even though I wasn’t, but I didn’t feel so weird I was unable to grab a picture of his house because I love old houses.

I know this is even way more off-topic than I usually am, but I’m so excited I was able to get these pictures I can’t help but share. This kind of makes up for the fact I missed the space shuttle being flown over us a couple of months ago. Everything was working against me today and I thought I’d miss the transit of Venus: I was on-call for transporting wildlife tonight and I often get home after dark when I’m on-call; the forecast for our area was cloudy and rainy; and I don’t have any of the proper equipment for directly viewing the sun. But I got the easiest possible transportation assignment and traffic was so minimal (which around here is nothing short of amazing) that I was home by 6:30. After I lugged my stuff into the house and stepped back out to survey the situation, the sun shone down directly upon me – there were clouds, but they weren’t obscuring the sun and there was no threat of rain. And I remembered the infrared filter I was using before I bought the infrared-converted camera – I had a hunch I could safely look at the sun through it. It worked beautifully! I snapped a couple of pictures with the 18-200mm lens that the filter was purchased to fit, then switched to the 400mm lens that it does not fit. But I was able to rig it to work anyway (so I feel like a genius :)). And here’s what I got:

I kept most of them exactly as they looked through the infrared filter because it seemed so appropriate, but I did convert one to B&W:

After shooting these images, I rushed inside to grab my tripod and set it up in case I wasn’t holding the big lens steady enough, but by the time I got the camera on the tripod, the clouds had rolled in and I never saw the sun again. Fortunately, the pictures I got turned out!

Was anyone else able to watch the transit?

At the end of my last post I said my next one would be about Nice, but I’ve decided to do the animal post next. I’m indecisive like that. There are a lot of pictures, so there will be little gabbing!

A sparrow outside the Paris catacombs.

While walking along the Seine, I spied these three adorable ducklings curling up to take a nap.

Nearby, their mother had her back to them and watched the river. It’s interesting she was more concerned about trouble coming from the water than from pedestrians; she must be pretty trustful of humans. Or maybe she was just admiring the big mud puddle called the Seine. She had no problem with me getting within six feet of her babies.

I realized I take a LOT of pictures of ducks. My first word was “duck” and I probably still sound like a 2-year-old when I shriek, “oooooh, duck!” whenever I see one, grabbing for my camera. This one was at the Rodin Museum. He was lined up with two other ducks and a group of Americans spent 10 minutes laughing about “getting their ducks in a row”, which they found to be a jolly good joke. Despite their repeated urging, I failed to get a picture of the ducks in a row.

One thing we noticed is there aren’t many bugs – at least flying insects – in France. I saw nary a screened window and you can bet I kept those gorgeous floor-to-ceiling windows open at all times, yet there were no bugs in either of our hotel rooms. This is reason alone to move to France. I currently sport about 30 mosquito bites on my legs following about an hour of yardwork. Anyway, there ARE, of course, bees in France, pollinating all the beautiful flowers we saw. (Spring is a lovely time to travel!)

One of our favorite parts of the trip had nothing to do with where we were. The first time we approached Notre Dame, I was snapping pictures wildly when I noticed a figure ahead of us covered in pigeons. It was peculiar; I couldn’t imagine why this person had pigeons all over herself. I even wondered briefly if she needed help as at one point we saw her waving her arm as if to shoo them away. As we approached and passed her, though, we saw she had dried rice that she was feeding them, and Mark and I simultaneously said, “Ohhhh!”. She overheard us and motioned for us to come over. She didn’t utter a single word for the entire 10 minutes or so we spent with her, but she gestured for me to come forward and Mark to take my camera, then she plopped some rice on my head. And soon I was covered in pigeons myself! WHICH WAS AWESOME.

Then it was Mark’s turn and he loved it even more than I did.

This made a huge impression on Mark.

So then Mark decided he wanted to become a crazy pigeon person himself and bought a bag of rice. (By the way, eating dried rice does NOT cause birds to explode; I know someone is going to ask me.) After that we had to stop in every park and other pigeon-gathering area. (After that we also had a lot of rice all over our hotel room floors.)

So we saw a lot of this:

And this:

This little guy was hoping for his share of rice as well.

Now, this is not a good picture by any means, but I’m including it for the variety because it’s the only picture of a European lizard I have. It’s also another example of me stealing lighting from another photographer. We were making the long trek back to our hotel in Nice after an exhausting (but amazing) day; we were fatigued, poor Brad had just hiked a million rocky miles with a bad knee, and we’d just killed a few bottles of wine at dinner, so we were slowly but surely trudging back to the hotel to crash before heading back to Amsterdam the next day, when I saw another photographer examining a stone wall very closely. So I walked up next to him to examine it as well and found this lizard. The lighting in this picture came from his flash….I barely know how to turn my flash on. Also, I must be the most annoying person to go on vacation and/or hikes with. I stop every six seconds to take a picture; I’m sure it is very irritating, although I constantly tell people not to stop for me as I will catch up. I don’t think anyone bothered stopping this time!

This is another picture taken walking back to the hotel after dinner in Nice, on a different night. This gull suddenly swooped down and started fussing a bit at this window. I could hear him impatiently thinking, “KNOCK KNOCK! Anyone home?”

Back in Amsterdam, Brad and April set themselves up for another “walk” that would more properly be termed a “wait for Renae”. Although they live just a block from a metro and tram station in the suburb of Amstelveen and are close enough to bike into the city proper, they also live just a couple of blocks from a cow and sheep pasture, with a creek to boot. The best of both worlds! Because I see a heron every time I’m out, of course that’s the first thing I saw, and although this looks a lot like a great blue heron (which is what we have at home), Brad informed me it is actually a grey heron. They also have purple herons, but I didn’t see one. April said she sometimes sees grey herons sitting on cars. That must be a strange sight.

The promised cows.

Just before “charging” April’s toy poodle…

Sheep!

Why is it I always feel like sheep want to steal my soul? I don’t trust these two.

Brad and April are so lucky. Gorgeous apartment, a stone’s throw from Amsterdam, and THIS is their backyard:

Oooooh, ducks!!!!

Baby ducks!

I really wanted to steal this one.

So many ducks.

This isn’t the greatest picture, but I think it’s funny because I think they are gossiping. Silly gossiping ducks. One headless duck.

I learned that this is a coot.

Look how so-ugly-it’s-cute their babies are!

Awww!

White swan.

Black swan!

The next day, Brad rustled up four bikes and I tried to remember how to ride a bike with pedal brakes (and promptly fell off the bike onto the handlebar, crushed beneath the weight of my backpack full of camera equipment, and bruised a rib – which I’m still dealing with…Brad thought it better after that incident if he carried my camera stuff while we biked), and we biked to Amstelpark, which boasts among other attractions a petting zoo. I’m opposed to zoos for ethical reasons, but I have to say, I was completely baffled by the petting zoo in the otherwise beautiful Amstelpark. It seemed to consist of three animals: a white peafowl, a wooly mammoth (or some other very wooly beast) standing in a bucket, and an albino kangaroo. Does that strike anyone else as completely bizarre? I think the albino kangaroo is praying, “please send me home to Australia!” in this picture.

A male peacock was perched on a nearby roof, looking into the petting zoo area, feeling “cocky”, no doubt, that he is able to fly and thus escape the fenced-in area containing the wooly beast in a bucket and the incongruous albino kangaroo.

I admit I stood and stared at the spectacle of the albino kangaroo for quite a while, dumbfounded, but finally the others were able to draw me away. We wandered along a path with Brad in the lead, when he suddenly stopped and whispered for me – I was, as usual, bringing up the rear – to quietly come up to where he was standing because there was a peahen sunbathing around the corner. She was magnificent, I tell you!

Then we arrived at a pond where I was completely overwhelmed by waterfowl, including the black swan above. I think I felt something akin to what an infant feels when they get sensory overload. I don’t even know what this is. (Do you? Let me know!)

And…

Not all the animals I encountered were wildlife. This picture was taken in Nice and is titled “I miss Gomez”.

After Amstelpark we biked into the city. The restaurant we wanted to eat in (Ethiopian, yay!!!) wasn’t open yet so we stopped in a bar for a snack and some beers. I was super happy because the bar was playing nothing but the Rolling Stones and there was a very sleepy cat next to our table!

I missed Torticia too!

My favorite animal of the trip, though, was our faithful companion Carrie, who went everywhere with us in Nice and Amsterdam. Here she’s smoking a Cuban. (Mark insisted on buying a Cuban cigar “because he could” and ended up smoking it for about 30 seconds before deciding it was disgusting. Mark doesn’t like cigars. He just doesn’t like the government telling him he can’t BUY cigars. Carrie didn’t think much more of the Cuban than Mark did.)

Whew! Okay that is ENOUGH pictures for one post. There won’t be nearly as many next time, and there will even be FOOD. I even took pictures of dinner tonight – which involves purple cauliflower and garlic scapes – so I’m not lying about that.

Today I’m going to show you some of the pictures I took in Paris that I felt were kind of artistic. But first a quick story. Of the two of us, Mark is far and away the more creative and artistic. I would never label myself an artist of any sort, whereas Mark actually considered a career in art before becoming an internet hacker. He goes through phases; sometimes he’ll draw for hours a day and sometimes he doesn’t pick up a pencil or brush for weeks or months. He seems to be especially inspired by travel, though, because whenever we go on a trip he draws with every second of downtime he has. He was especially prolific on this trip. I have a picture of him in Nice literally sketching while crossing a street. He never plans ahead well enough to pack drawing supplies, though, so whenever we are in a new city, we have to find an art supply store so he can buy a sketchpad and other supplies. So when we were walking along the Quai Voltaire in Paris and he saw an art store, we had to go in. Although it had two stories, it was small and crammed with stuff and the employees were running back and forth locating items for customers, and I felt completely in the way with my backpack and camera, but I refused to wait outside because I was charmed by how old the place seemed to be and how completely different it was from any place in the States. Finally Mark purchased everything he needed (EXCEPT AN ERASER, which was to haunt us later), we went on our way, and I kind of forgot about it. Until today when I was reading Anna Gavalda’s Hunting and Gathering (at the recommendation of a commenter!) and some of the characters went to an art store on Quai Voltaire called Sennelier. I figured it was the same shop we’d been in because I didn’t recall seeing any other art supply stores, so I googled it and apparently it’s famous for serving Cezanne, Degas, and even inventing products for Picasso. Which is what I love about Paris. You can’t AVOID history or art there. You’re trotting along and hey, there’s Notre Dame. You walk into a store and ask for a bottle of India ink and the great-grandson of the guy who mixed paints for Degas and Picasso retrieves it for you.

Moving on to my sorry excuses for art…. This isn’t a particularly great photo, but something about it reminds me of very early photographs. I think it’s the guy in the middle – his coat looks like he could be from almost any time period, and something about his pose just makes it look old-fashioned. Taken with my infrared camera, as were all the B&W pictures in this post.

As I mentioned, Notre Dame crept up on me.

It’s an enormous building. It’s hiding in this picture.

Another very famous church, Sacre Coeur. This one I had specifically gone looking for.

Sacre Coeur is worth climbing the stairs of Montmartre for just in its own right, but being located on the highest ground in Paris, it’s also a great vantage point from which to see the city.

If you don’t want to climb the stairs you can apparently cheat.

But the stairs really aren’t bad at all and you can stop as many times as you’d like to take in views like this one:

Another place we visited was the Rodin Museum. We only saw the gardens, which are open late on Wednesday nights during the spring and summer, only cost a euro, and contain many of his statues.

The flowers were all very pretty as well.

As were the flowers at the Jardin du Luxembourg.

The Seine was super muddy during our trip; I don’t know why. Brad and April reported it hadn’t been very muddy when they were there a few weeks before us.

It was so muddy I almost prefer it in false color, even though I don’t usually like false color.

At sunset, though, the muddiness was downplayed quite a bit.

No post about art in Paris would be complete without a pseudo-artistic picture of the Eiffel Tower, right?

I am ready to move on to Nice now. (I am also ready to move TO Nice now; it was splendid.) I have a lot of animal pictures I wanted to share, but maybe I can cram all of the animals from the entire trip into a single post. I’m not sure – there ARE two weeks worth of animals… We’ll see. It looks like tomorrow we’ll be spending the third day in a row sitting in a hot house waiting for the air conditioning repair people to make an appearance, so if I don’t die of heat stroke before then, I may post again then. If not, Happy Memorial Day to those of you in America….tomorrow Mark and I will have managed to celebrate (or in the case of France, endure) three different national holidays in three different countries over the course of three weeks!

WARNING! Portions of this post may be NSFW if you work for a particularly prudish osprey.

Yesterday I went to Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge. In some ways it seems like the national park time forgot. It’s unmanned – the $2 entrance fee is based on the honor system – and the entrance road and parking lot don’t appear to have been paved in a couple of decades. There’s a vehicular trail that Mark and I have driven around before, which left us bored and confused because we didn’t see any of the abundant wildlife we were promised. I suspect, possibly because we were in a Jeep, we were expecting a safari. We didn’t stay that time, but I later had a hunch I’d have much better luck on the pedestrian trails, because wildlife would probably like a park no one knows about. I therefore returned on my own yesterday. Without my faithful tripod boy, I decided to forgo the tripod and try my luck hand-holding the rather-heavy telephoto lens.

The moment I set foot on the trail, a bunny crossed my path. I took this as a good omen, and it turned out to be so.

If bald eagles are Mason Neck’s claim to fame, osprey are apparently the neighboring Occoquan Bay’s. Within minutes of my lucky rabbit I was rewarded with:

Things quickly got a little…racy.

I have to admit, I’m a sucker for raptors. I think they are fascinating. When I came home and saw how well some of the pictures of the ospreys turned out, I was excited and sent a link to the whole set to Smark, my mother, father, and Fortinbras. Every one of them except my father said the osprey photos were nice but they loved the tree swallow. (My father said they were all great.) Don’t get me wrong, the tree swallow is adorable, but he was by far the easiest picture I took all day! He stood still staring at me for five minutes as I was a foot away – all I had to do was get far enough away to focus on him with my completely unnecessarily huge lens.

I’m enraptured by raptors, but I like little birds too. For example this Eastern bluebird.

Here she is again. I like this photo but I can sort of envision it as a Hallmark “get well soon” card or something.

I do love the gentle nature and sweet innocence of songbirds, but look at the power of this thing!

How can you not be in awe of a creature that is clearly looking at you thinking, “I wish you were a fish so I could tear your flesh to shreds and eat you alive.”?!

In other news, we are leaving for our trip to Amsterdam, Paris, and Nice in a few short days and I am busy preparing. I probably won’t have time to post again this week, although I will try to make a post from abroad. Here’s a quick raccoon update to tide you over:

We got five more tiny babies in. We always give them a stuffed animal in their cage to snuggle with, a kind of surrogate mom. Here they are after their first feeding of the day, snuggling under the purple bunny.

Aaand, we pawned another baby off on Emmie! What a generous mother she is! Here is (most of) her brood:

Smark was catching up on I Eat Food yesterday and said, “it’s turning into a raccoon blog.” Oops. Hey, that’s my thing, right? There are about a gazillion vegan food blogs, but how many of them have baby raccoons, I ask you? I have food posts planned, though. There was even a recipe in Life: a User’s Manual (which I finally finished), and you know how I love making recipes I find in fiction. It’s French of course, so it requires some heavy veganizing. When I return, the farmers market will be open (can….not….wait) and I’ll be so inspired….either by the fantastic food I enjoyed in France, or the starvation I endured there!

And now, I must get back to frantic preparations…beginning with some non-frantic sleep.

Well, the general consensus seems to be people are not annoyed by my copious amounts of wildlife pictures even though this is a food blog and as a vegan, wildlife is certainly NOT food. I’ve already managed to amass more pictures than you may have bargained for, so here we go!

Not first chronologically but perhaps first in terms of “most exciting”, we saw an eagle!!! Yesterday we went to Mason Neck Wildlife Refuge, where they happened to be having an Eagle Festival, which was cool because we got in free (they usually charge admission but apparently not on festival days), although I was a bit concerned that the ruckus would keep eagles away rather than attracting them even if the festivities were in their honor. It turns out, however, that Mark and I never even managed to find the festival, although we weren’t looking for it and we did actually hear it while eating our lunch in the picnic area. Anyway, Mason Neck is home to some bald eagles, but I’ve never managed to see one in the wild. Yesterday we were near the beaver dam, where I was shooting (with my camera, of course!) a blue heron (apparently blue herons love me because I always encounter them) when Mark saw a bald eagle soar across the sky and land on the top of a far tree. Fortunately, I was trying out my brand new (to me) 400mm telephoto lens, which was conveniently already mounted on the tripod and I was able to take this picture:

He was so far away I had to crop the photo quite a bit despite the awesomeness that is my new lens, but this was a wonderful event for me. I think Mark, though he hasn’t uttered a word about the money I’ve spent on photography equipment lately, may have considered the new lens an unnecessary extravagance…until I was able to take that picture of the eagle, who looked a bit like a small dark blob without looking through the lens.

That was definitely one of the highlights of a really great day, but let’s back up and look at some other things we saw at Mason Neck. There’s the heron I already mentioned, who is eating a fish in this picture:

Cover your eyes and scroll down a bit if you don’t like snakes, because here is a black moccasin:

Mason Neck Wildlife Refuge is on the Occoquan Bay. A long, winding bridge takes you from one of the trails to the beach, over some wetlands. Like all of the B&W shots in this post, this one is infrared:

The wetlands:

The same picture as above, in “false color”, which is a technique you can use when you have an IR filter that lets in some visible light. I don’t ordinarily like false color, but I thought this particular shot looked okay. I actually found out by accident my IR camera will record false color images without me having to do any processing at all.

Here is the beach:

After a picnic lunch at Mason Neck, we went to the adorable little town of historic Occoquan. Every time we pass the town on 123 heading to 95 South, we comment on how cute that town is and how we want to see it. So yesterday we did. It was just as cute as we’d thought it was. You pass through a little park to get to the boat dock.

On the dock, we watched the frenzied mating dance of a little bird:

Unfortunately, the female wasn’t too impressed.

We also watched a vulture go dumpster diving.

Our thoroughly delightful day was drawing to a close when we stopped by a cute little cafe for both a wine AND a beer tasting. The beers were really good and we stayed for a pint. In this picture I want to show you some of the weird stuff infrared photography does. My glass is about two-thirds full in this picture – you can tell by the foam – and the glass and the beer are both totally normal, and looked totally normal in real life. Notice, though, you can see through the bottom half of the beer. I honestly don’t know why that is – if someone out there does, I’d love to know. I know infrared light can travel through some things visible light can not, but I don’t know why HALF the beer is visible and the other half is not. (Less of a surprise is the fact you can see through the sunglasses on the top of my head. You can’t normally, of course, but at least it’s consistent in the photo!)

That beer isn’t the first instance of IR pictures befuddling me. Last weekend in Burke Lake, I took this picture of a black heart painted on a tree, mostly because I like Joan Jett & the Black Hearts, because Joan Jett does not give a damn about her bad reputation.

But look at the infrared version! So strange!

Finally, Mark and I by the footbridge over the bay:

We had a wonderful day yesterday! I was going to give you a raccoon update tonight as well, but this has been so long, I’m going to save raccoons for tomorrow.

For Lisa G/K and others interested in an update on what I’m reading: currently, Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec. I think it’s great – the deeper you get into it, the more intricate and impressive it is – but it’s taking me forever to finish it, both because it’s long and because, unusually, I am reading so many other books at the same time. As I’m preparing for a coming-too-fast trip to Amsterdam and France, I’ve been reading French and Dutch books exclusively, including, The Discovery of Heaven, The Discreet Pleasures of Rejection, A Very Long Engagement, Chocolat (yes, I realize what the last two have in common), and its sequel The Girl with No Shadow, and a few others. I’m also reading Julien Parme in the original French, as well as a few French readers in dual languages and other “educational” books. I’m so excited about going to France that I can’t wait for our trip, but at the same time I wish it were further away so I had more time to prepare and get better at the language. I’m enjoying re-learning French so much I’m planning to continue my studies after our return.

Ready for another “really more a suggestion than a recipe” post? Well, ready or not, here comes such a post. I worked from home today, to allow some contractors access to not really do anything in our house. Earlier in the week I had thought vaguely of taking advantage of being at home to bake some bread today, perhaps to be served with some soup for dinner, but I’m really busy at work these days and when I looked at the clock with a mind towards starting dinner, it was 6 p.m. Ordinarily I’d tell you that any loaf of bread I’d bake will take a minimum of 18 hours from start to finish, because I always use some sort of pre-ferment or starter. But even if I were willing to lower my standards and bake a “same day” dough, starting at 6 p.m. and having bread in time for dinner would be an impossibility…right? I mean, you’re looking at at least 3 hours rising and proofing time, close to an hour baking time, and an hour to cool. (Cooling is non-negotiable, sorry. Slicing hot bread ruins it.)

Not only THAT but my scale is broken. How can I bake without a scale??? (And WHY is my scale broken?!)

There was an answer, though. I thought back to an earlier time, when I didn’t have a scale. I didn’t have my faithful mixer Hieronymus. I didn’t even have the two Kitchen Aid mixers I destroyed before Hieronymus graced me with his wonderful presence. I didn’t have a Thermapen, hand-crafted proofing baskets, multiple peels, a sourdough starter named Sally, or a Fibrament baking stone. What I had was a bread machine I hated and an incredible desire to turn myself into a bread baker, despite producing several paperweights the first few times I tried.

I was a much newer vegan, and still learning how to cook, back then and I spent a lot of time on Vegweb looking for recipes. I found a promising recipe for homemade bread: Outrageously Easy BIG Bread. Back then I think there were only about 10 comments (it looks like the old comments from before Vegweb updated their site a few years ago were removed; this was much longer ago than 2006), but they were all positive, so I gave it a go. And I was successful! I quickly began building a reputation among my friends for always having fresh homemade bread…people would regularly show up at 2 or 3 a.m. demanding some!

I’m a bread snob now. I’ve been an official tester for Peter Reinhart. People come to me for advice…and starter. I ordinarily wouldn’t deign to put more than a tablespoon of instant yeast(!) into a single batch of bread…ordinarily I’d use no instant yeast because I’m a sourdough gal all the way. But tonight, sans scale, I broke out my unused measuring cups and spoons, googled “outrageous bread”, and followed the familiar recipe…well, except for throwing all the ingredients into Hieronymus and having him knead them for a little bit for me. But if you don’t have a mixer and you want to try baking bread and you’re frustrated that EVERY recipe assumes you have a Kitchen Aid, except the famous no-knead recipe, but that takes a million hours…I’ve made the recipe as instructed, without a mixer, many times, and look where I am today!

So today’s post isn’t a recipe, at least not one of mine. It’s an encouragement to those scared of bread baking to give it a shot. And it’s a reminder to those who aren’t scared of bread baking but are snobbish like myself that sometimes you CAN make bread in two hours. Some photos to prove it:

After kneading for about two minutes. (But again, kneading is technically unnecessary.)

I let it rise for 45 minutes, then did a quick “stretch and fold”, which is a technique I’m sure I’ve documented somewhere on this site, but instead of searching for it, here is Peter Reinhart demonstrating it.

Partially because I was super busy with work and partially because I wasn’t really thinking, I returned the dough to the rising container after the stretch and fold, even though the recipe says to shape it and do the second rise on the baking tray. I was planning to make four small loaves for bread bowls and if I’d been concentrating on the bread instead of work, I’d probably have done a stretch and fold at 20-25 minutes, then let rise for another 25 minutes or so, then shaped into four rounds and let them proof for 45 minutes on the tray. But instead, I let the dough rise for another 45 minutes in the rising bucket, while pre-heating the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit, and realized when I was ready to bake that I hadn’t shaped them. Here’s the dough, risen quite a bit, but not shaped.

No matter. I decided I’d just hope for a lot of oven spring and merrily but roughly divided and roughly shaped my loaves.

Then I baked them for the prescribed “exactly” 23 minutes, although I’m here to tell you that REALLY baking time is going to depend on your oven. After years of experience with all kinds of breads I can tell you that 23 minutes is not enough, especially if you use all that dough for a single loaf; even my tiny loaves really should have stayed in at least 10 minutes longer. However, I was too busy to worry too much about it so when they looked fairly golden at 23 minutes, I took them out and later regretted it. There IS such a thing as paying too little attention to your bread.

Now, ESPECIALLY if you are making bread bowls like me, COOL the bread before cutting. I know it’s hard. Mark managed to time his grand entrance home from work about two minutes after I’d removed them from the oven – I had JUST sat down – and he walked through the door loudly and excitedly exclaiming, “SOMETHING SMELLS AWESOME!! I can tell SOMEONE worked from home!” To which I shouted, “DO NOT TOUCH THEM! NO TOUCHING!” It’s true I worked from home, but as I didn’t start this bread until just after 6 p.m., I could easily have made it any other day, even if I had gone into the office! Well, if I had gone into the office and left at a reasonable time instead of some stupid time like 8 p.m.

I made Creamless Asparagus Soup for the bread bowls.

Okay, so not only is this post “more a suggestion than a recipe”, it is also more a shameless excuse to post completely non-food-related photos than a recipe. First of all, we have a cardinal family that lives in our yard and I’m always delighted to see how loyal Mr and Mrs Cardinal are to each other. They’re always together. I love it! And today I caught them kissing! It’s not a super-sharp picture because it was taken through a screened window, but the cute factor made it a keeper nonetheless.

I was alerted to the presence of these little lovebirds by Torticia, who suddenly took an “OMG!” stance while looking out the window:

And guess what else it’s time for?!? BABY RACCOONS, that’s what! These sweet little babies – a family of four boys – are about 10 days old in this picture, taken on Saturday, a few days after their mother failed to claim them after they were evicted from a chimney. I’m very sorry they won’t be raised by their mother, but very grateful that the homeowner opted for a cruelty-free eviction and spared the lives of these tykes, who would have been killed by most “pest” control services. If you find animals in your chimney or home, PLEASE search for a humane eviction alternative. They almost always result in the babies being reunited with their mother, and they never result in baseless wildlife murder.

Outside at the sanctuary, we found a friendly wild and pregnant raccoon having some breakfast. Because she wasn’t afraid of us, she is definitely a rehabbed raccoon from a prior season, returning to give birth in the safety of the sanctuary grounds.

She was hamming it up for the camera! Raccoons have huge personalities. I’m so glad I chose to work with them!

Ugggggghhhh. Saturday was flip-flop weather and today, Monday, THIS:

WHAT IS THIS???

Here’s why Mark is great, or one reason anyway: Fortinbras was here last week and he and Mark went to the mall so Mark could buy a new computer. I refused to go because I despise the mall. When they returned, I was informed that once they got to the Apple store, Mark abruptly announced, “buying a new computer is stupid; let’s go buy Renae something instead,” so they went to Williams-Sonoma and got me a bean pot for no apparent reason. I hadn’t done anything to deserve said bean pot, especially a mere week after Christmas, when I got a Vita-Mix, but I’m not complaining because I’ve been wanting a bean pot, so yay!

The bean pot I suddenly came to own was packed with a couple of recipes so today I decided to make the included Oven Baked Beans recipe, which is slightly non-vegan with its can of pork and beans (and Worcestershire sauce, but since it’s easy for me to buy vegan Worcestershire, I don’t even register it as a non-vegan ingredient). So this is my adaption of the Le Creuset Oven Baked Beans recipe.

Le Creuset Baked Beans

1 1/4 cups dried kidney beans
1 1/4 cups dried baby lima beans
1 1/4 cups dried pinto beans
1 1/4 cups dried Great Northern beans
1 14.5 oz can vegetarian baked beans
1 medium onion, diced
1 8 oz can tomato sauce
1 cup loosely packed brown sugar
1/4 cup molasses (I used blackstrap; the original recipe didn’t specify a type)
1/4 cup vegan Worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup prepared mustard
2 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
2 Tbsp liquid smoke
2 Tbsp chili powder
1/2 tsp smoked pepper
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp salt
hot sauce to taste – I used homemade sriracha
1 packet Goya artificial ham flavoring (optional, but it’s weirdly vegan, so if you want some of the hammy flavor you’re missing from the can of pork and beans, do it up)

Place the kidney, lima, pinto, and Great Northern beans in a large vessel. Cover with several inches of cold water and soak overnight (or all day). Alternatively, cover with several inches of boiling water and soak for one hour.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Dice the onion.

Stir or whisk together the rest of the ingredients.

Drain the soaked beans.

Stir together all of the ingredients in a bean pot, Dutch oven, or large casserole.

Cover …

… and bake until done. The original recipe said to bake for two hours, and after two hours it was certainly edible, but I like my beans creamier so I added more water and baked for another hour.

Serve. This makes way more beans than you will probably need unless you are feeding 40 friends.

Moving on to completely off-topic items, the lovely Zoa asked to see some of the infrared pictures I took in Charleston and I can’t turn Zoa down.

Infrared filters work by blocking all visible light and allowing only infrared light to pass through to the camera. Because all visible light is blocked, the filters appear to be nearly opaque and you need to use shutter times of several seconds to many minutes, and thus you need a tripod. The images you make will appear very red with black detail. Usually you’ll convert this to black & white, where things that reflect a lot of infrared light, like foliage, will be more exposed, or lighter in tone, than they normally appear, which can give pictures an otherworldly appearance.

Here’s what a photo looks like before being converted to B&W:

This is the first infrared picture I ever took. I didn’t have any idea what I was doing and just held the shutter open for a random amount of time, so I don’t know how it ended up relatively well exposed. This is from Middleton Place. The South, with all that gorgeous Spanish moss, is a great place for these types of pictures.

Another from Middleton Place.

My tripod boy (Mark, acting as my assistant, is in charge of carrying the tripod) staged this photo. Can you find him? You can click for a full-size version if you need help.

From Magnolia Cemetery:

From Folly Beach:

We got a little silly by this time and started goofing off with the long exposures. This is me and Mark HAUNTING YOU.

Mark calls this one Portrait of an Artist as a Dead Man.

Okay, nothing too amazing, but I had a lot of fun taking them and am looking forward to playing around with the filter some more.