signing off as a family of 2...

everything changes in about 8 hours! lez, its been a fun five years, and i can't wait to start the next chapter!

working up an appetite

quads humming. stomach growling. ready for some lunchalicious green zebras!

Suburban posse mi whhaan hear you!

Yellowman provides the title and soundtrack for this morning's ride... a short jaunt around the local back roads. http://blip.fm/~vg7zn

Summer Harvest In Full Effect

Every trip into the garden is bringing mad veggies into the kitchen...these photos show consecutive weekends worth of goodies...there's a san marzano sunday lunch cooking up as i type...

Nightly Harvest

Two posts in one night? Believe it! Its a blogging explosion!

The Almar garden is in full effect right now. After coming back from a 3 day trip, there was all kinds of chaos...tomato plants crashing out of their cages, cucumbers going ballistic, the first eggplants and a couple of godzilla squashes, with one pictured alongside a couple of bottles for scale. that would be the polite picture...



Its pretty cool to go in there and find harvestable veggies every night. I threw a handful of san marzano and yellow pear tomatoes into a sauce with an eggplant...from garden to pan in a couple of minutes. Now I just need to figure out what to do with 4 pounds of squash!

Adirondack flava

A few photos from last weekend's trip to the Adirondacks. Union Falls Pond is about 10 miles North of Lake Placid...we stayed on the lakeside camp of Jason's friend Dave, who's got mad boatbuilding skills! The 2am arrival was key...so nice to wake up in the middle of nowhere for a couple of days completely devoid of blackberries/cellphones/etc!

for new readers and old

yes, its been way too long since i posted. and there's been all kinds of good stuff coming out the garden. so apologies that this took so long, but here are the first of what promises to be a bumper tomato harvest, a couple of costata romanesca squashes, a hot pepper and the latest in a production line of cucumbers...next up eggplants...can't wait!

sorry about the lousy picture quality. i'll either blame blackberry or my inability to use its camera. scratch that, its way better than the camera on my other dinosaur nokia phone!

Wenger's new siging

OK OK, so I've become a cog in the Nike marketing machine, but I figure that this is as close as I'll ever come to getting signed by Le Boss...



Arsene knows...

The proud owner of two dead legs

I knew this one was gonna hurt. I haven't been on the bike for way too long, so its probably good that I didn't have to keep up with anyone! While there were plenty of nice views, I definitely need to step it up a bit if I want to cover more ground and have something left in the tank afterwards!



In terms of the Almar Garden 2.0, I've done a bunch of work on the aesthetics, and have planted the spring crop...a few varieties of peas, brocoli rabe, arugula, spinach & radishes. I've got tomato and pepper seedlings coming up, and hope I get better results from the transplants this year!

And in other news, Lez and I are having twins, hopefully some time in October!

cucina chiantigiana alla siriana

If there's one thing in life that pisses me off*, it's the gratuitous use of the adjective "Tuscan". Restaurants love it. Decorators too. Most of the time the object in question is about as Tuscan as John Edwards' mistress (she's on the cover of the Post today in case you're wondering...). But it sells, so the marketers can't attach it to too many products...

But cavolo nero is the real deal Holyfield. It goes into my favorite all time dish, ribollita, and finds its way into many other tasty formats. But tonight I found a way to bastardize a Tuscan classic with the wife's S-Y roots.

Peep this: http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/vegetable/recipe-cavolo-nero-kale-065339

It's going into the garden in the not too distant future...bring on the spring!


*There is far more than one thing in life that pisses me off.

does this site still work?

Fair comment. I've been lazy. Haven't updated this beeeeeyatch in way too long. Interesting stuff happening around this way, but I gots to be hush hush, on the QT.

In the meantime, an experiment:

best catskills ski mountain? day http://twtpoll.com/srcbjd #twtpoll four feet of snow in four days...

Anybody voting from CityCountryCity gets a mad shoutout to my worldwide audience next post!