Capes and Gold Lame

The Midsummer's party is now in it's 9th year.  It would be it's 1oth anniversary, but my sister took a year off the year she was remodeling her kitchen (foolishness, I know.)

The party agenda is as follows:
1. show up
2. get dressed up in a selection of the craziest hat, pants, shawl, dress, scarf, and bling you can lay your hands on.
3. eat amazing, exotic food (I still don't know the name of the Puerto Rican fruit I tried)
4. compliment others on their eclectic outfits.
5. settle in on a section of persian carpet.
6. pick a role from "Midsummer Night's Dream" out of a hat
7. participate in a read-through of "Midsummer's Night Dream" by the light of japanese lanterns.
8. Help clean up a little. (this year it involved throwing pillows up through a second story window.)
9. Regretfully take off your finery (or not so regretfully if you decided on the 3-inch brocade heels or the wool tweed hunting jacket)
10. Head home, sated with good food, good company, and good humour.

*I intended to edit these photos for simple color corrections, and grouping them to better advantage.  However, this week has been insanely busy, and I thought it would be better to publish the pictures as is, rather than publish them a week later.  So some are too cool, some need a bit of cropping, and many of the night pictures need serious exposure and color adjustment.
Pardon Gentles, all.

 

strawberries and sun

 Are wild strawberries really wild?
Will they scratch an adult, will they snap at a child?
Should you pet them, or let them run free where they roam?
Could they ever relax in a steam-heated home?
Can they be trained to not growl at the guests?
Will a litterbox work or would they make a mess?
Can we make them a Cowberry, herding the cows,
or maybe a Muleberry pulling the plows,
or maybe a Huntberry chasing the grouse,
or maybe a Watchberry guarding the house,
and though they may curl up at your feet oh so sweetly
can you ever feel that you trust them completely?
Or should we make a pet out of something less scary,
like the Domestic Prune or the Imported Cherry,
Anyhow, you've been warned and I will not be blamed
if your Wild Strawberries cannot be tamed.

                   Shel Silverstien, "Where the Sidewalk Ends"

Some friends and family and I went strawberry picking the other week, during that hot spell when May tried to act like July.  We got up in time to catch the dawn, filled water bottles and gathered buckets, and set out.  We were out picking before the sun had time to burn the coolness off of the fields.

Hand picked strawberries are different from store-bought berries from California or Florida.  They tend to have more taste and character, because they are picked exactly when they are ripe rather than before.  They also are generally smaller, and come in more quirky shapes.  Store berries have been bread for size and shelf appeal.  These berries were bred for taste and the Ohio climate.
The local berries also directly reflect the kind of growing season that we have.  A wetter spring results in more strawberries that are generally larger and more juicy, but with less flavor. This year, the berries were reasonably flavorful, and very, very sweet with plenty of juice. The most delicious strawberries I have ever had came from a year when we had a spring drought.  It took forever to fill a bucket, but each strawberry was a flavorful bite of heaven. The tasted the way you always have known a strawberry should taste, but it never quite does.

We took our bountiful buckets home and processed them for cooking and freezing.  While I was washing them by the sinkful, there were a few berries that just... looked like a photograph waiting to happen.  So I took them out into the searingly clear sunlight, and photographed them.

The photographs have such a different character than than my previous pictures of strawberries.
Small wonder, as these are a wilder kind of strawberry.

  

of course, in the end, the strawberries were tamed, and turned into this:

And It Was Good. Very, very good.

I love cooking, but I don't normally post about food.  It's just not what I want my blog to be about.  However, I've been practicing photographing food.  There's a knack to making food look appetizing on camera that I think, honestly, might make me better at taking portraits of people.
Also, I helped make the most amazing dinner, and I thought I would share with you.

Today, my family and I made pizza on the grill, a first for us.

Today was the first sticky, damp day of the year.  Mom made up a lovely lump of bread dough this afternoon, However, the moist closeness of the air sapped her of all will-power to add more heat to the air by baking said lump of dough.

So, at about 6:30, I decided that I would cook instead.  Mom had some fresh mozzarella she wanted to use up, so I decided that we should have pizza, and that further, it should be grilled.  That way we wouldn't add more heat to the house (our old, cranky oven leaks heat) and Dad and "E" could have fun with Dad's new fire pit.  Plus, it would be an adventure!

So I started roasting a red pepper over one of the burners, and batted my eyelashes at my papa so that he would start a fire for me.  For some reason, he was very easy to convince.  Probably it's because he got to play with fire, and then get tasty things afterward.

Normally, home-made pizza is kind of an arduous process, with all of the chopping and sautee-ing, just to get the ingredients together, and the bread dough to make as well.  However, this time, the pizza's just came together.  It helped a great deal that mom had made the bread dough ahead of time.  I was surprised. Even roasting the red pepper was easier than I remember. I love the taste of roasted red peppers, but I never do it because A. red peppers are expensive and B. the oil from the roasting usually splatters and makes a burnt mess all over the burner.  However today it was easy to clean up after, and was the key ingredient in the pizzas' amazing taste.

I don't have a precise recipe, but the ingredients are as follows:

lump bread dough (enough for 2 pizzas)
1 1/2 c fresh mozzarella
1 1/2 c fresh mozzarella, marinated in pesto
6 oz asiago cheese, finely grated
1 c generic spaghetti sauce, with fresh ground pepper and garlic powder added to taste
1 roasted red pepper, peel removed.
2 tomatos thinly slized (added to one pizza only)
16 oz italian sausage, cooked and crumbled.
grated black pepper to taste

It was such a lovely layering of smells as the sausage cooked and the pepper roasted, with an underlaying of the comforting smell of rising bread.  The sharp smell of garlic powder and black pepper.
Then outside, where the burning wood gradually grew stronger and took over the wet grass and lilly-of-the-valley scents that had been there before.  And then the cooking pizza bubbling away and mixing all the lovely cooking smells together.

For the first pizza, the fire was too hot.  It was the perfect height and shape for hamburgers, which made it cook the pizza bottom far too quickly.  Surprisingly, the coal black bottom didn't ruin the pizza.  Mostly, it just added crunch.

For the second pizza, we knocked the logs apart, letting them turn into a bed of coals, and covered the grill so that the top was cooked more evenly and infused with a wonderful, smoky flavor.
Perfect.

If you have tried this, or want to try this, let me know.  I would love to know how it turns out for you!

First Fruits

A few days back, I took a colander of strawberries out to the back patio. Sometimes photographing food is easy.

PS. they were super good, even the one that looks frozen and unripe.
Happy late spring!

Baking bread

I've been practicing photographing food.  It's not as easy as it looks.
I think that food tricks me, through it's smell, and the physical feel as I'm preparing it.  I always think it looks better than it actually does.  There are so many dishes that are lumpy, or brown, or both.  It takes some serious tricks, excellent garnish, and a repertoire of cute serving dishes to make food look nearly as good as I think it does.

Bread however, is a very humble food.  I find it, not good looking, but beautiful.