Scotland: Day 1

Our first day in Scotland was a busy one. We started off the day with a visit to the Glenlivit Distillery. We took a tour of the Distillery and sampled some of their Whiskey. A good way to start the day!


We then headed to the Abernethy Forest for a nice hike. We saw some new birds (several species of tits). It was a beautiful day.




We met a few cows along the way




Rooftops during the ride home

Houstons and Smiths in SD

My parents, Biggy (aka Andy Smith) and Don and Janet came to the house for dinner tonight. We had a fabulous dinner prepared by Don and Biggy and got to spend some QT out of the deck. It was great to have them all here. I just wish Jeff had been here to enjoy them.

The whole clan

My lovely parents

The Smiths (Janet, Biggy and Don)

Quinn contemplates the destruction of the wind chimes

The munchkin trapped inside to protect the wind chimes from harm

What a lovely evening....I wish they were all here all the time.

A Visit to the Beach

My parents, Biggy and Don and Janet arrived at Don and Janet's beach house in Mission Beach yesterday. Quinn and I joined them for the entire day today. This was Q's first time at the beach since becoming mobile. He had a blast playing in the sand. He wasn't so sure, however, about the FREEZING cold water. I can't say I blame him. Brrrrr. Missing the NC water temps for sure.

Yo mama, wassup?


With his posse watching his back.


Even the cool kids have time to hug the mama.


One week of solo-parent duty down and one more to go. This week has had its challenges...fevers, teething, temper tantrums, but the kid and I have been spending a lot of time together (no daycare on thurs/fri) which has been pretty cool. He's getting much more verbal. Today (with Janet and Mom's prompting) he actually said "mama" a couple of times. We still need to work on that one, but he's now saying quite a few other things: uh oh, no, shoe, cheese (these two sound alike), up, and (my favorite) "bad baby". He signs a few others: more, hungry, finished, thirsty, dog, airplane. He's also now starting to get his animal sounds: tiger, duck, dog (pant), cat, snake, cow. I have a couple of videos of the crazy monster that I'll post sometime. Too tired at the moment. It's past my bedtime. Gute Nacht!

Cuteness

I don't know how I'm going to leave this face for 10 days.

Luckily I still have a week plus to prepare myself for departure.

Quinn has been quite the mama's boy lately and I admit that I've been eating it up.

Of course It seems he loves his monkey as much as he loves me.

But his monkey can't have screaming contests with him, so I win. :)

Queen Palm Jam (by Jeff)

What to do with those messy palm fruits covering your sidewalk? Make jam!

I've never made jam or done any other form of 'canning' before, but it's been on my radar for some time, so I recently decided to give it a go. One might think that for my first jelly/jam/preserve-making effort, I'd go with something straightforward... maybe follow a recipe, or at least try to make a food that I was personally familiar with, so as to be able to gauge whether things were turning out as they should. But it wasn't fresh strawberries that inspired me to buy my first canning jars. Rather, it was those sweet smelling, if unsightly, orange palm fruits covering my front yard that prompted me to open up Joy of Cooking and see what making fruit preserves was all about.

Familiar sight? (Fruits of the Queen Palm...I think..."littering" the ground)

Here they are in the hand, along with the tree they came from:

Although I am not 100% certain, I am pretty sure this is a Queen Palm. I did a bunch of internet research, and it seems that the Queen Palms is the most common species of palm tree planted in southern California (or close to it). Descriptions and photos I found of Queen Palm fruits, foliage, and trunk morphology all seem to match what I've got in my front yard, which looks the same as most other palm trees in our neighborhood and indeed the city.

Ok, but are Queen Palms edible? They certainly smell edible. And they taste edible, too. If you gnaw on one, you will find them syrupy sweet, and incredibly sticky. You can't just eat them outright, though, because there's not really any flesh to them -- just a bunch of woody fibers covering a hard pit:

I found conflicting information on the internet about the edibility of Queen Palm. Some sites said yes, others no. But all primary sources (e.g., botanical pages) indicated that yes, these are edible. And having nibbled on several to this point without incident, I concluded that at least they are not lethal in tiny amounts. How's that for the scientific method?

Perhaps the lack of total consensus on their edibility comes from one source I read that said they are edible when ripe, but contain a neurotoxin to mammals before ripe. So, wait until they turn orange and fall to the ground before you imbibe.

Right, so anyway, time to make jam. A bit of improvising here, combining some Joy of Cooking jelly-making fundamentals with a "Palm fruit jelly" recipe or two that I found on the internet. These recipes use Jelly Palm fruit as the main ingredient, which is quite a bit different from the Queen Palm, so the recipes aren't quite transferrable.

Step 1: Boil the fruits covered for about an hour, periodically mashing and stirring. There is very little water in these fruits, so you have to add a lot. I started out by just covering maybe 5 cups of fruit with water but ended up adding probably 5 cups of water or so (I didn't count). This is resulted in the liquid being the consistency of maybe a fruit nectar-type drink.

Step 2: Place contents in a colander lined by 4 layers of cheesecloth. Let drain into a bowl for a couple hours.

When making proper jelly, you apparently only use the thinnest clearest liquid, i.e., that which drains through the cloth with only the help of gravity. But I got less than a cup of liquid this way, perhaps in part because of all the fibrous matter clogging up the sieve, or because I didn't make the original mixture thin enough. Beats me. But I wanted more volume, even if it meant a cloudier or inferior product in the end. So I closed up the cheese cloth around the pulp/seed/juice mixture and squeezed as much juice out as a could. This ended up giving me 4 cups of pretty thick liquid (not as thick as corn syrup, but perhaps close to this).

Step 3: The 4 cups of palm fruit juice went into a stock pot along with the juice from 1 lemon, a box of fruit pectin, 3 cups of sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon of butter:

Most recipes call for more than 3 cups sugar for this volume of juice (e.g., more like 5), but in addition to this juice being very sweet on its own, it turned out that 3 cups of sugar was all I had in the cupboard, and I was too lazy to go to the store. To make matters worse, one of those cups was brown sugar (which turned the concoction dark). What the heck...

Right, so after boiling the brew for about 15 minutes (stirring frequently), it was time to jar:

The next evening, I gave it a full taste test. The texture is somewhere between a jam and a fruit butter (for example, apple butter). The taste is somewhat reminiscent of apricot and pumpkin. I can tell you that it goes excellently on goat chevre with a glass of Savignon Blanc. And having eaten several full servings of it to this point (it also goes well on a bagel with cream cheese), I can vouch for its apparent edibility.

August?

How it got to be August already I have no idea. I just realized that I have not had a baby-centered blog post in quite some time, so I'll pack this one full of photos and info! Quinn is quite the boy. He loves to be destructive and to throw things. Long ago Auntie Emily coined the name, "Ivan the destructor". It's quite the fitting name and we're considering an official legal name change.

"Oh mighty rock, finally I have captured thee, now the power of the universe is mine all MINE!"

Rock sailing through the air (see between his feet) to land with a satisfying THUD. Ah, the joys of rock-hurling!

Quinn thinks he's pretty cool. I didn't tell him that most of the cool boys don't use pacifiers.

This is one of the reasons that usually walk up/down the street instead of using the stroller...Boris has claimed it as his own.

Over the past few weeks we've taken the boy out for a few adventures. First we hit the zoo. Quinn is finally old enough to appreciate the animals, especially if he can ride them.

Baby loves goat and goat loves baby.

We also had a recent trip to the aquarium. This was not on the same day as the zoo, but apparently Quinn likes to wear the same clothes day after day.

We do have occasional down time. Here Quinn takes a moment to relax with one of his favorite toys, Daddy's cell phone.

So if you follow this blog you know that we've been doing a lot of work in the backyard. We've saved quite a bit of money by allowing Quinn to do the bulk of the hard labor (Don't tell him anything about child labor laws!).

Merlin almost always makes him smile.

The boys sharing the view. I think here's he's just chucked a big rock over the wall and down the canyon. Can't wait to see what other objects he can find to hurl into the yard!

Well, I guess that about sums up the past few weeks. We're off to spend the afternoon with the cuz up in the north county. Both boys are getting their molars so it should be a fun time. :)

Backyard Progress

Over the past few weeks we've been having lots of work done in our backyard. We're having a patio and deck built. The end is finally in sight. Here are some photos of the progress:

This is the before photo - The shed in the background is gone, the retaining wall was rebuilt a few feet closer to the house and the rotting patio cover came down. Where you see the bricks in this photo is where the deck is being built.

Step 1: Demolition

The new and improved wall and stairs into the yard (which is now wide enough at the top of the canyon to be usable space)

View of the wall/walkway and future home of deck

The deck begins!

The patio poured, the wall brown-coated, tiles added, lights installed

The stucco is complete and we have stairs! You can see that the Trex for the deck is finally in. We should have a deck by early next week.

View of the patio

Terra cotta tiles ready for installation. They are not yet installed...first they have to be sealed, so hopefully by next weekend they'll be in

We're hoping to have a deck warming party by next weekend, so keep your fingers crossed that we finish all of this work by then!

Come visit!