11:11 on 11/11

It’s 11/11 once more, and I’m all set to post at 11:11. Seeing as I’ve already posted a list of eleven things (that goes up to 11), I thought I’d try something different. Below are 11 bits from my photo library that evoke 11:11. Can you identify what they are? (Click on the image to see the full photo.)

apples and crisp fall days

Big bins of apples.

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but I love the fall. I especially love fall in New England, with the stunning foliage and trips to pumpkin patches and apple orchards. (And you know we’re big fans of Apples in this household.)

On Sunday we paid a visit to a local apple orchard that has an apple tasting each year.

We’d been apple-picking at this orchard in previous years, but I wasn’t sure what to expect for the tasting. It turns out that it was a very low-key event, with not too many people. But there were a whole lot of apples.

Inside the barn/farmstand building, they had set up a long row of wooden bins, each with a different kind of apple. In front of each bin was a little bowl with apple slices, and attached to each bin was a tag with the name of the variety, and bits of information about the cultivar and its history. I felt like I should have taken notes. (For example, I wish I could remember to tell you which kind was the most popular apple in the US in 1900.)

I knew that the orchard claims to grow over 50 varieties of apples, but I thought they’d perhaps have a dozen or so available to taste. I was quite impressed that they had probably closer to 2 dozen kinds out on display with samples set out for tasting. It turns out the folks at the orchard store apples that are typically only available earlier in the season specifically for the tasting weekend.

In spite of all the varieties, I ended up choosing a couple of bags of some familar apples: Macouns (a Mac variety) and Empires (which I love for making applesauce). And now I should have plenty of apples to make an apple crisp.

The orchard has this gigantic walk-in refrigerator. I wish had someone in there for scale.

Apples of my eye.

Theo, post-smooch-from-Phoebe.

Sevilla Tapas tour

Three glasses of Manzanilla sherry being poured at El Riconcillo, the oldest bar in Sevilla.

I’ve been meaning to share some more stories and photos from our trip to Spain, which was (shockingly) now over a month ago. I have largely given up on sharing a detailed chronlogical account of the trip, so I’ll dive in here.

In Sevilla, my mother and I had the fantastic opportunity to go on a tapas tour with azahar, Sevilla blogger extraordinaire of casa az and Sevilla Tapas. (Yes, you should be jealous. It was an absolutely fantastic evening: the company, the sights and the food could not have been better.)

To make you even more jealous, I thought I’d share with some highlights of our evening. With photos.

We met up with az around 9:30 p.m. on a Friday, after I got Theo settled in for bed. (John was kind enough to be the one to stay home with Phoebe and Theo.) We arranged to meet at a little park near our apartment, which was bustling with folks heading out for dinner, and then walked through Sevilla’s maze of streets and alleys to our destinations. We went to 3 very different places for tapas, each with a distinct charm and menu.

Our first stop was El Rinconcillo, which az tells us is the oldest bar in Sevilla. I loved the decor of the place, which was dominated by dark woods, patterned tiles, and shelves well-stocked with bottles. (Not to mention hanging hams.) We stood at the bar.

Our second stop was Modesto, a more modern, bustling bar-restaurant with friendly waiters and lots of outside tables. (We sat inside at the bar, though.)

Our third and finally stop was La Sal, a charming and elegant small restaurant specializing in fresh seafood dishes. We sat inside at a table by the window.

Here’s the menu from our tapas tour:

El Riconcillo:
• Espinacas con garbanzos: spinach stewed with spices and garbanzo beans.
• Revuelto de setas : eggs scrambled with mushrooms
• bread and bread “bullets”: a fresh, crusty roll plus bite-sized bullet-shaped crunchy breadsticks

Modesto:

• Calamares de campo: batter-fried onions and green peppers. (When I read the help “food translations” page at the Sevilla Tapas site, I was quite amused by the name, which translates roughly to “squid of the field.” It reminded me of “land squid.” )
• Aceitunas: olives (and the Spanish, they do know a thing or two about olives)
• Alcaparrones: pickled capers (these are large capers, about the size of smaller olives, not small ones like are used in cooking in the US. You bite them off the stem. They are tasty.)

La Sal:
(Sadly, I don’t remember what these things were called in Spanish. For that matter, I forgot what they were called in English, so I snagged the names from the Sevilla Tapas page on La Sal.)

• fresh sardine on toast with black olive paste
• tuna “tataky” in a light soya sauce
• warm goat cheese salad (This was advertised as being with roasted cherry tomatoes. The tomatoes were actually not roasted, but sliced in half

Peering in through the wide open window of El Rinconcillo from the sidewalk.

The bartenders wrote the tabs on the bar in chalk. They’d cross out the numbers once the tab was settled.

Here was our tab–a pretty good deal for 3 glasses of sherry, an omelette, and some spinach.

My glass of sparkling water at Modesto.

Some olives and az’s beer, and a really big bowl of really big capers.

The Land Squid.

One of the waiters at Modesto gave us red carnations. Az put one in her hair.

Tuna tataki at La Sal. I think the stuff on top was something leeky. The sardines, which az cut in 3 for us to share, are in the background.


The very yummy goat cheese salad with carefully halved (not roasted) tomatoes.

I liked the way this wine rack glowed, but felt a bit awkward about taking a picture of it while there were people sitting at the table in front of it. Happily, we stayed so late (enjoying the food and conversation) that we were the last ones there!

Az also posted about this night, though in a more timely manner! In case you missed her post back in September, check it out: “girls night out.”

If you want to be tormented by photos and descriptions of delicious food about daily, you might want to follow Sevilla Tapas on twitter. (Or join the Facebook fan page.)

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This post is trying to pass itself off as a Monday Mission. The assignment for this week was to write a post in the form of a menu. I actually did such a task once before about 2 years ago, and you should totally go read what I wrote before, because I re-read it, and I cracked myself up. (“cereal: it’s what’s for dinner“) Also, go check out the other Monday Missions at Painted Maypole. The illustrious Painted herself has a brilliantly creative menu posted that I would have liked to have written myself!

roasted caramelized pears

I made a discover recently: I love to roast things. Mostly I roast vegetables, but a couple of months ago, I decided to try roasting pears. Now I have a new food love.

Roasting pears is really easy, and if you use juicy ripe ones, you get the added bonus of caramel flavor without adding even a bit sugar. Here’s what I do:

1. Start with ripe pears. I like to use Bartlett, once they’ve turned from green to yellow. I find things work best with pears that have gotten somewhat soft, but not totally mushy.
2. Cut pears in half, peel, and cut/scoop out the cores.
3. Arrange them flat side down in a single layer in 13×9 glass baking pan, or your roasting pan of preference.
4. Bake at 350 degrees for about an hour.
5. When finished, the pears will be lightly browned and the juices that have run from the fruit will have mostly evaporated and caramelized.
6. Remove the pears from the pan with a spatula. Put a tablespoon or two of water in the baking pan, and stir around with the spatula, scraping the caramel from the bottom of the pan. (You may want to let the pan cool a few minutes first, especially if using a glass pan.) Poor the resulting caramel/juice mixture over your pears, which will absorb most of the liquid.
7. Serve warm. (I like them as they are, but I imagine they’d be good with vanilla ice cream, as well.) (They’re also pretty good cold, for that matter.)

1. The ingredients: some ripe bartlett pears.

2. Some pears that have been halved, peeled and cored.

3. Pear halves arranged in a baking pan.

4. Roasted pears just out of the oven. (Okay, I did add a bit of extra cut-up pear. You don’t want the pan too full, though, or the juices won’t caramelize.)

5. Some of the caramelized juices stuck to the pan.

6. Roasted caramelized pears, ready to eat.

since I didn’t really show off our pumpkin

Phoebe and I designed and carved this jack-o-lantern together. I like it.

The October Just Posts

Welcome to the October Just Posts, the latest edition of our monthly round-up of blog posts on topics of social justice. Holly and I appreciate your continued support.

• Alejna, at Collecting Tokens, with: Celebrating 5+ Years of Marriage in Massachusetts
• Em, at Social Justice Soapbox, with: Venting
• Emily, at Wheels on the Bus, with: Glamorous
• Erika, at Be Gay About It, with: Stuffings or No Stuffings, We’re Getting Some Kids and President Obama Fierce Advocate of Rousing Speeches and the Status Quo
• Fatboyfat, at Make Lard History, with: Inverted Reality
• flutter, at by flutter, with: forgiveness
• GirlGriot, at If You Want Kin You Must Plant Kin, with: Tall and Tan, Young and Lovely and Attention White Folks
• Hedgie, at Princess Hedgehog Chronicles, guestposting at Talkin’ with the Teenie, with: The Unbearable Tenderness of Boys
• Holly, at Cold Spaghetti, with: October Awareness and Get It? Got It? Good.
• Kitty, at The Show Must Go On, with: Working the Cracks
• Kristina, at Everyday Public Relations, with: Does Sensationalism Help or Hurt Conservation?
• Magpie, at Magpie Musing, with: Meat
• Mary, at the Eleventh, with: Ma: Little Bigot On the Prairie
• Mary Beth, at Cats…Books…Life is Good, with: Are We Losing Our Humanity?
• Meagan, at Hades Arrow, with Frozen
• Megan, at Missing in Iraq, with: Uncensored II
• thordora, at Spin Me I Pulsate, with: In Health there is Freedom, Health is the First of all Liberities

This month’s nominators:

• Alejna
• Emily
• Holly
• Meagan

If you have a post in the list above, or would just like to support the Just Posts, we invite you to display a button on your blog with a link back here, or to the Just Posts at Cold Spaghetti. If you would like to have a post included next month, you can find out how to submit posts and all sorts of other stuff about the Just Posts at the information page.

remember, remember

It’s the 5th of November. Which makes me remember some things about remembering.

I’m fascinated by memory, and clearly I’m not alone, judging from the large number of movies, stories, songs and such that feature themes of memory. Or loss of memory. Here’s a ThThTh list of some things I can remember:

Some memory-related things that come to mind

• The poem about Guy Fawkes day:
  

  Remember, remember the fifth of November,
  The gunpowder treason and plot,
  I know of no reason
  Why the gunpowder treason
  Should ever be forgot.

• remember the Alamo!
• mnemonic devices: phrases, poems or other sayings used to aid the memory for specific facts, such as:
  • Roy G. Biv (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet: the order of colors in the rainbow)
  • homes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior: i.e. the Great Lakes)

  (more mnemonic devices here)



• string tied around a finger: if you need to remember something, you can tie a string around your finger as a reminder that there was something you were supposed to remember. This relies on you being able to remember what it was that you hoped to remember.
• souvenir: a keepsake or memento, typically from a visit to a place to which one has travelled. From the French verb souvenir, “to remember”
• memento: an object kept to remember a time, place or event. From the latin remember:
  

  L. memento “remember,” imperative of meminisse “to remember,” a reduplicated form, related to mens “mind.” Meaning “reminder, warning” is from 1582; sense of “keepsake” is first recorded 1768. (from etymology online)

• Memento (2000): a movie about a man who loses his ability to form new memories.
• The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004): a movie in which people can undergo a process of selective memory erasure.
• Chester Tate: A character on the 70s TV show Soap who spends several episodes with amnesia.
• “Tabula Rasa,” a Buffy episode: A spell gone awry causes the main characters to forget who they are. Hilarity ensues. (Seriously, it’s a really fun, funny episode.)
• “The Forget me Knot,” an episode of The Avengers in which Emma Peel forgets who she is. (This was Diana Rigg’s last episode on the series.)
• “Forget Me Not,” an amnesia episode of Gilligan’s Island (Okay, I didn’t actually remember this one, guessed that there was an amnesia episode.)
• For that matter, there are probably plenty of episodes from sci-fi shows like those in the Star Trek and Star Gate universes.
• The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996): Geena Davis plays an amnesiac ex-spy
• The Bourne Identity (2002): Matt Damon plays an amnesiac ex-spy
• Who am I?/Wo shi shei (1998): Jackie Chan plays an amnesiac spy.
• Total Recall (1990) Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a spy whose memories were re-written
• lots more movies and shows with a memory (or loss of memory) theme can be found here:
• “I Don’t Remember,” a song by Peter Gabriel
  

  I don’t remember, I don’t recall
  I got no memory of anything at all

• “I can’t forget,” a song by Leonard Cohen. I can’t forget, but I don’t remember what.
• “Only a Memory,” a song by the Smithereens
• The Persistence of Memory: famous Salvador Dalí painting with melting watches
• memory: a card game also known by the name “concentration”
• memory: a computer component for storing data



• Remember when Chris Farley interviewed people? Remember how he interviewed Paul McCartney? That was awesome.
  

  Chris Farley: You remember when you were with the Beatles?
  Paul McCartney: Yes.
  Chris Farley: That was awesome.

That’s more like it.

Theo improves his web surfing skills.

You’ll be happy to know that I’ve solved the Mystery of the Feed Reader Mess. I hate to spoil the plot for those of you who haven’t read all about it, but it turns out that the problem was alien frog creatures.

(In case it isn’t clear to you, I am setting the bar very low with this NaBloPoMo business.)

web surfing: unclear on the concept

Theo has yet to master the finer points of web surfing.

Yo, dudes! Can anyone tell me what happened to Google reader? At some point in the last few weeks, it stopped displaying blogs in folders, and I can’t make sense of the big jumble of unread posts that are accumulating. I keep popping over, realizing that it’s all a big mess, stabbing at a few unread posts, and then wandering off again. I think i may have to move along yet another feed reader, or revert to Safari. Is there some way to fix Google reader? What are other people using these days for a feed reader?

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In other news, Holly and I are putting together the October Just Posts, which we’ll put up in a few days. (Possibly Friday.) If you read and/or wrote any posts on topics of social justice in the month of October, we’d love to include them in our roundtable. We need your help to keep the Just Posts alive!

Want to learn more? Check our the JP info pages here or there.