Estrus on my trigger finger

Just got home from deer camp 2009, lugging a 48.5 lb, non-wheeled cooler up the stairs to our house with pretty much my last strength. My guess would be I'd carried it about 100 rods over the course of my multiple-shuttle-and-subway-transfer return to Boston. This expenditure of energy didn't include the initial dragging of my own (not hard) and my dad's (moderately hard as draggings go, very hard as two guys lifting on top of SUVs go) deer. We then scun and butchered two of them, which requires a non-trivial amount of labor to get cooler worthy hunks. I learned a thing or two about flying with deer last year; it's a long story involving multiple trips through security and a fair amount of bloody water on the ground. This year I weighed it, saving me 50$ by keeping it under 50 lbs, and sealed the meat up better, avoiding bio-hazards and the stress of watching your cooler sit on end out on the tarmac waiting for one more drip to keep it off your plane. As I watched this years cooler being loaded onto the plane in Milwaukee, a fly buzzing around my blood and fat encrusted shoes, I thought, "Sherva, you've got it made."

Deer camp itself was awesome. We got four deer between Mark, deer camp mainstay Tom Stoltz, my dad and myself. My deer was a pretty small doe, no spots, totally counted as a deer. My dad got a nice eight pointer. My brother's first deer was a trophy buck, 10 points. The first deer he knew he got was a nice doe. At lunch, he mentioned seeing a big buck right away in the morning but didn't say he'd shot, too embarrassed to say he'd missed. Several hours and 6 shots later, on the way out to drag his doe back to camp, they randomly came across a huge dead buck. Mark then fessed up to shooting the deer early that morning...in the face. He'd looked for blood but only found some hair since the bullet lodged in the body cavity, leaving no outlet for the red stuff. Uncle Dale, Jon, and Eddy and crew came and visited, but we didn't see Mark much that night because he was always checking his facebuck.

In the cold, hard terms of meat ascertainment, venison $9.89 per pound.

Expenditures: 369$
One round trip flight to Minneapolis: 178$.
One out of state hunting license: 141$.
Whiskey: 30$ (debatable whether that expense would have happened sans deer camp).
Checking one blood-tight cooler: 20$ (see note about whiskey).

Muscle: "Approximately" 37.3 lbs of boned, de-fatted venison
The cooler also contained 5 lbs of chokecherry and lingonberry jellies and syrup (a number that was the result of 4 of 6 trials I did subtracting my own weight from that of our combined), two lbs wild rice (according to the packages), 2.2 lbs of frozen water bottles (looked up on internet and not converted frozen water weight to approximately account for the weight of the bottles themselves and the large plastic bag the venison was sealed in) and the cooler itself (lets just call it 2 lbs, I'm not pulling the deer meat out of there and weigh the cooler).

Maintaining a family tradition I've attended since I was 13 except for that year I was in China: 400$
You gotta have limits; if the cost of the trip would have been $31 more I would have stayed home and bought 80 lobsters or...wow, mail order Waygu beef is expensive, like $215 for four 10 oz ribeyes. Now that's a lot of money for meat. I'll get my own. Suckers.

In summary, hunting, processing, and transporting your own meat is a physically demanding yet rewarding experience. Probably a lot like childbirth.

One Year Down

Well, we've lived in Boston for a year now, a milestone we celebrated by drinking the bottle of champagne the realtor left us when we moved in with some oysters. Bet you didn't know we had oysters living with us. They keep to their beds for the most part. We were both somewhat surprised by how similar living here has been to the other cities we've lived in. Certain things (seafood, general quality of pizza) are mildly better; others (driving, Massholes) are slightly worse, but I sort of think there are more similarities than differences to living in larger U.S. cities--at least in Mpls, STL, and Boston.

We do sometimes use wicked as an adjective to modify other adjectives, which is still a conscious decision done for the the novelty. For now. I can also affect a slight Boston accent when I want to fit in with the Massholes. I guess that's about the only way we've become Bostony, Liz was a honker when we moved. I also get angry at and think bad thoughts about people who do inconsiderate things while I'm biking, but it's still the inwardly directed, Minnesotany kind of anger that simmers more than it yells swears at strangers. My co-worker who moved from IA says he likes the east coast abrasiveness because you know immediately who the assholes are; in the midwest it can take years to find that out.

We got visited several times, which was nice. My dad (2x), Liz's mom and Mitch, Liz's cousin (2x), Liz's sister (Kris), Liz's aunt and uncle, Missy and Rob from NYC, our Alabama friends, Greg, and Craig (last night) have all made appearances. Come on out, it gives us an excuse to eat lobster.



On the MN front last year, we made it back a few times and saw our last game in the Dome, where Liz had her last Dome Dog. We always wish we could be there more.




I've found that if I just pretend the Twins making the playoffs is like them winning the world series, it helps. Their runs have been just as exciting as any world series game and it softens the recovery time after a bad playoff performance.


Oh, and of course we were thrice blessed with nepheeci last year. It turns out there's not a collective word like "siblings" for nieces and nephews, so I invented one.




Pretty decent year, all told.

Tasting Mother Nature's Booty

One of the things we were most excited about home ownership was finally being able to grow some edibles. We tried beets, peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, peas, herbs, and cucumbers. Our results were mixed. The peas and cucumbers died within weeks of transplanting them outside. The zucchini flowered but never zucchinied. One beet survived in a pot. I grated the little guy over a salad. It was enough to turn the dressing pink. The peppers did OK, I think we got about five off of three plants. The greenies went into a salsa and the reds went into a shrimp and spinach and brown rice concoction. The cherry tomatoes were a big success, we ate them by the handful and had plenty for salsa.



we inherited an apple tree in the back yard as well. The squirrels got most of them but we had enough for Liz to make a crisp for us and one for the neighbors.


The mint garnish came from the garden as well. The rest of the basil and thyme went into pesto. Some made its way onto this salmon and we froze a nice batch as well.



I do not believe our farm was cost effective compared to what we'd have paid at the grocery store, after buying all the planters and soil we'll probably break even around 2012 if we keep at it. It was fairly fun either way and we were proud of our meager yet tasty harvest.

The Phantom

Do you love the state fair but hate children and the sound of their laughter? Think agricultural equipment is unworthy of looking at? Believe quilting and jam making should be simply appreciated and that to judge them cheapens their respective art forms? Think butter is for eating and not sculpting? Hate rides that spin? Think adults who walk around with giant stuffed animals are idiots? If you answered yes to more than three of these questions, you may not in fact be a fan of the fair and simply like overeating. If this is the case, man, does Boston have the thing for you. The Phantom Gourmet is a local TV show where a guy goes around to New England restaurants and tells you what's good. It's food porn at its finest, and every year the show hosts the Phantom Food Festival outside Fenway featuring the best of the best dishes from his favorite eateries. So get this--40 bucks gets you in the door and it's all you can eat from there. Yesterday, the neighbors Chris and Mandy and I went there to do battle against crowds and moderation.

I hesitate to even post this since we strive for truthfulness on this blog and I'd hate to have people start accusing me of exaggeration, but here is an alphabetized list of the things I ate:

Ahi Tuna (pictured below)
Arancini
Beer (Budweiser, born on May 9th. Unacceptable.)
Beer (Michelob)
Beer Cookie (don't ask, it was full of fennel and disgusting)
Calamari (sauced in the buffalo style)
Cheesesteak
Chicken pot pie
Chicken wing (Asian, pictured)
Chili
Chowder (clam)
Clam (drunken, possibly the best thing I ate although it's tough to say for sure)
Conch fritter (pictured)
Cupcake (Kick Ass brand)
Fries (French)
Hoagie (Italian)
Hot dog (with bacon, cheese, and BBQ sauce)
Ice cream (coffee and oreo)
Meatball (regular)
Meatball (veal)
Mess, the (a disappointing pasta dish)
Peanut butter cup
Pickle (spicy)
Pizza (two (2) slices from different pizzerias)
Pop (blueberry)
Rib (BBQ)
Ricotta Gnocchi
Root beer
Sherbet (rainbow)
Steak tip
Sushi
Taco (mini)
Truffle (had some fruit B.S. in the middle instead of chocolate, I nearly spit it in the woman's face)
Whoopie pie (smuggled home in Mandy's purse and eaten post-nap)

That is all. I'm not one to use the term hero lightly, but I ate heroically. After Liz got off work, we reconvened with the neighbors for some much needed exercise in the form of bowling. And nachos, we had nachos. My first Massachusetts bowling score was a respectable 123, Liz's a paltry 130.

Acadia (North Shore East)

Over labor day, the wife and I threw the tent, a rasher of bacon, and a length of stout rope into the car and drove up to Bar Harbor, Maine, the location of Acadia National Park. The scenery on the drive up was straight out of northern MN, a mixture of pine and birch forests. When we got to the park, we were immediately struck by how much it resembled the North Shore's rocky islands. You'd have to taste the water to tell that it was ocean instead of Superior. The ocean was dotted every 20 yards or so with markers for lobster pots, which make lobsters:




When they wash up on shore they make good tripods:



The scurrying rocks were not very challenging. The mountains were a bit higher than in MN, with Cadillac mountain being the highest. Here's us at the top:


One day we rented bikes to take out on the park's extensive system of carriage roads, built for horse drawn carriages by John D. Rockefeller('s money) in the early 1900's. It was about as nice a bike ride as you could want:

There's a very old restaurant in the park that is famous for their popovers. We stopped and had a few while we looked at these boob hills.

We did not see any moose, which is probably for the best since the language barrier between us, who only speak the MN dialect, and the locals might have resulted in a diplomatic, even life threatening disaster, as anyone familiar with how similar "It is an honor for us to visit your lands," and "The ticks on your mother are thick and engorged and smell of alewives," are in the moose language family, along with the moose's propensity towards goring, knows.

In summary, Acadia is nice, but if you want the same scenery without the cost of a flight, go to Tettegouche. Also, here is a carving of an Indian with a ladder in his nose:

The Neighbors

We've now spent many evenings sitting out in the back yard chatting with the neighbors, Roslindale natives Paul and Dierdre. They are super nice, fun people and we hit it off right away. So, as an enjoyer of food and the preparation thereof, I started asking about the things they like to eat so that I might one day wow them with an elegant yet casual dinner spread. Since our grills our 30 feet apart, I often see them cooking dinner. The only things I've seen them grill, however, are steaks, burgers, hot dogs, and boneless skinless chicken breasts, leaving me little to go on. During my initial inquiries, we established that Dierdre does not eat anything that has ever spent any portion of its life in water.

Lobsters? "God No."
Fried fish? "No sir."
Shrimp? "Eww."
Salmon? "I'll eat fish sticks but I don't really like 'em."

OK, so seafood's not their thing. Would you ever try venison? "Not in a million years." Her eating habits have since turned into a kind of running joke, where I talk about the stranger things I eat/have eaten and ask her if she likes them. The answer, invariably, is no. I had the queen mother of these exchanges with her yesterday evening. It started when Paul was saying how Dierdre sends him to work with treats for the mechanics in the auto shop he manages.

"Today I sent watermelon, I also do a lot of bacon."
"Wait, you send him to work with a pile of fried bacon?"
"No, bacon, the Boston way of saying baking."
"Oh, that makes more sense, but you could make a great salad out of watermelon, bacon, and some cheese."
"What kind of cheese?"
"Oh, goat or feta are the most common."
"I hate both of those."
"What kind of cheese do you like?"
"American."
"That's it?"
"Sometimes cheddar."
"Those are about the only two cheeses that would not be good in a bacon/watermelon salad. What about mozzarella?"
"I like mozzarella, but only melted on pizza, I wouldn't eat a big hunk of fresh mozzarella."
"Do you like blue cheese?"
"Hate it."
"Then what do you dip your chicken wings in ?!"
"I don't eat chicken wings."

Wild Weekend

Liz took the bus down to NYC to go to our friend Missy's bachelorette party on Saturday morning so I had a whole day and night to myself. I was pretty worried about her but tried to have some fun on my own. The list of things I was worried about included:

A group of unaccompanied females is an attractive target for Middle Eastern terrorists, New Jersey guidos.

Swine flu from contaminated penis straws.

Jeter and A-Rod confusing Liz for a man and stealing her away from me with their smug, soulless charms.

News, and the commencement of its dissemination.

Although somewhat paralyzed by worry, I attempted to soldier on and make some use of the day. After I dropped Liz off, I made myself a man sized breakfast of home fries, eggs, bacon, and Smuttynose IPA. I then played some golf, came home, and ate a dozen oysters with a G&T. Just when my night of bachelorhood was about to get really crazy, I sat down on the couch to watch the Twins, watched about 1.5 innings, then fell asleep and woke up around midnight. It was probably for the best since my coworker and I had plans to run a ~9 mile stretch of this trail that follows Boston harbor early the next day. It was a nice little weekend.

Weekend

Had a nice little weekend here. We played a game of poker on Friday night, a tournament for a new ipod touch my coworker got free with the purchase of a Mac. Liz exited early, leaving me to match wits with the field. It came down to me and a relatively inexperienced player who had a substantial chip lead after knocking out the last few players on a single hand. I went all in on an open ended straight draw after the flop which included an ace. I figured she didn't have an ace and would think I did, but like an idiot, she called me, winning the tournament on a jack high. She was pumped and I'm glad she won.

Saturday we checked a new state off our list--Rhode Island, America's Tattoo...

not...

We took our bikes and did a nice ride on a path along Narragansett Bay. It was nice, lots of tidal marshes and some rocky islands. Providence seemed nice and even had a brew pub. We had some wings whose superbly crafted sauce almost overcame the slightly overdone nature of the meat itself. All in all they were highly noshable but hardly life changing. The beer selection was not large, maybe 5 brews available. I had their imperial IPA which was nice and hoppy but served out of a cask. Its temperature was not ideal for post-bike ride refreshment. Liz's spicy blond ale was better. Here's a picture of Providence's skyline that I stole off the internet.

Do You See A Trend

As I type up this blog I am realizing that most everything I blog about has before and after pictures. I blame it on HGTV, What Not To Wear, and all those other shows that are about taking something and fixing it up. Well, if you like those shows and my posts, you'll like this post.

Every week I am amazed at our yard and garden. It really is beautiful. I have to give the previous homeowners props on all the perennials and how everything is scheduled to come up and bloom at different times.

Here is a pic from our front garden in March:




Our garden just a couple days ago:

The New Do

Liz - Before Cut




Liz - After Cut



Wow! I was a ghost before I went to the beach on Sunday. I'm glad that it looks like I have a nice tan in the photo (in real life it's more of a burn).

Bathroom Re-do

As many of you know, the previous owners of our house loved red and shades of red. One of the last rooms in our house screaming for me to cover up its embarrassing shade of pastel pink paint was our upstairs bathroom. I thought this would be an easy task, boy was I wrong...painting cabinets is not as easy as you would think. I started the project with less than a week before our friends Erin and Jon were scheduled to arrive. The night before their arrival the cabinets were still a bit tacky and I had Rick feverishly putting on new hinges and knobs. Everything looked great until we tried to close the cabinet doors. Turns out I may have put a little too much primer and paint on the insides of the doors and the cabinet base. Good thing we've got some tools. I took the wood plane (that's right, this was a job for a plane not some wimpy sand paper) and got rid of the cabinet I felt we no longer had a need for. So when you come to visit, don't snoop in our bathroom cabinets, they are not as pretty on the inside as the outside.

Upstairs Bathroom
Before

After

Fun Food Facts

We made baba ghanoush last night. It's pretty much pureed roasted eggplant, lemon juice, tahini, olives, and garlic in which we dipped toasted pitas. We enjoyed it; please don't tell homeland security. We had it with pork so we should be fine. The pork was infadelicious! Crap, the pork was spiced in a middle eastern fashion so maybe that cancels out the porkiness. But wait, we had wine with it too so we're probably not in imminent danger of landing in Guantanamo Bay.

And now for the fun fact--the molecule that makes us taste mint and the one that makes us taste black licorice are identical except they are mirror images (stereoisomers) of each other. Everyone knows this. What most people don't know is that due to this fact, if a left handed person drank a Jaegermeister mojito they would die instantly. The exact scientific reason for this is not easily explainable to the layperson, but it has to do with the way lefthanded people's deviant, twisted brains are wired to their tastebuds...which have horns. The same thing would happen to a right handed person in the southern hemisphere, of course. The good news is that anyone can enjoy a refreshing Jag mojito while standing on their head. The more you know.

Return of the Coons

After our friends left, lobster shells were plentiful in our uncovered garbage can. Thus, Monday and Tuesday nights saw the return of the marauding pack of raccoons (Procyon lotor, the rabid, chattering scavengers of the urban wilderness) who visit our backyard periodically. The first night I believe they were just scouting and creating caches of food for later consumption. We watched them out our window with a Mag Lite. The next night, our beam revealed a flurry of masked glowing eyes and pink lobster carcasses. As Liz was transfixed on the feeding frenzy, Phoebe the cat suddenly jumped up on the windowsill in front of her face, giving her a hilariously bad fright. I told her I could solve our neighborhood's coon problem once and for all if she let me get a sweet air rifle (with an infrared scope, of course); the catch being we have to eat any and all coons killed, possibly in some sort of unholy stew. Liz reasoned that garbage eating city coons should probably not be eaten, unlike the clean rural coons sold for consumption at the St. Louis farmers market. I reasoned that these coons eat lobster. We never decided for sure, but I think the coons will be left to their scurrying. For now. The last few nights have been peaceful, but they'll be back. They always come back.

We played softball last night on the neighbors' team. I'd sort of forgotten how much I loved playing. The team is terrible (winless until Liz and I joined) so there's zero pressure to perform. Which makes it doubly awesome to see their surprise when you make a running catch, take an extra base on a lazy throw back to the infield, back up an off target throw or a missed play in the outfield, or even just slide into a base. We lost last night 17-8, through no fault of Liz or I. It was a ridiculously fun game. While we were waiting to play, there was an altercation in the parking lot which culminated in someone attempting to run down another person with their car. The nearly hit person then threw a bat at the fleeing Jeep, landing a solid shot. I was on the lookout for a retaliatory drive by during our game.

And finally, Liz continued her "transformation" into a no-nonsense-east coast-in-your-face-type person on Monday as she once again berated unsupervised children, this time for messing with the treadmills in our community center. I was proud and only slightly embarrassed.

Good Friends, Loose Lips, Tall Ships, and Attitude

Erin and Jon, our good friends from Alabama, St. Louis, and now Alabama again were in town last weekend. They brought do rags for us and a lady bug do rag for Phoebe, which she was ecstatic about.

We first took them to the Barking Crab, a restaurant we'd seen on the TV show Man vs. Food. I guess we shouldn't have been surprised that the food sucked at a place we heard about on a program where the point is to conquer the food rather than enjoy it, but it was an overpriced tourist trap featuring eight dollar "bowls" of clam chowder containing exactly two clams, soggy crab cakes, fish and chips where all the breading falls off after the first bite, bland fried shrimp, decent fried scallops and calamari and chips, and sticky communal picnic tables. Neither man nor food won this contest, one got grease induced gut rot and the other got unceremoniously turned into excrement. Liz did yell at some bratty kid with inattentive parents for sticking his grubby little brat hands in the communal silverware bucket. Tres Bostony.

The weekend picked up from there since it almost had to. We looked at some Tall Ships and then hit the North End for some Italian dessert and coffee, then took them to the oldest continually operating pub in North America. It's called the Bell in Hand and it's not all that cool. More of a "so you can say you did" type of thing. Then we went home and were in bed by, oh, let's just say 10:45.

The next day we forced them to walk part of the freedom trail, just so they could say they did. We're very particular about people actually doing the things they say they did. Then we went to a place called Eastern Standard near Fenway where we had awesome oysters, probably the best salad I've ever had (poached egg and lardons over frisee) and a tongue sandwich. A cow's tongue, not my own tongue disguised with a bun and mustard like in cartoons. After that, we saw the Red Sox play the Royals.

The Sox won one to nothing, which makes for a pretty boring game when you don't have a horse or a Twin in the race, Big Poppi notwithstanding. Then we came home and allowed ourselves to stay up until, oh let's say 11:30.

Saturday we decided leaving the house was a horrible idea so we had an all day tasting menu. We started with Liz's famous buttermilk waffles, moved on to watermelon, goat cheese, arugula, and sesame salads, then fried manchego pucks with spicy honey, then scallop and tuna ceviche, and finally venison gorganzola juicy lucy sliders. Liz, who is currently sitting behind me studying vocab for the GRE, says it was ambrosial and metamorphosed our appetence into satiation.

Then we put on do rags and hung out with the neighbors until, oh probably about midnight. We were feeling saucy. Sunday, we ate some lobsters and put them on a plane back to AL. Pretty nice weekend, all things considered.

More STL pics (not taken with cheap cell phone)