The Minnesota Orchestra hosts an annual event known as Sommerfest.  These concerts span every genre of music (or close to it) and focus on an easy-breezy, light, intro to certain types of music.  Three solid weeks of music smashed into Peavey Plaza and Orchestra Hall.

This episode in life focuses on trying out music… something new to do.  After scanning the artists available to view I settled on Halloween Alaska as the artist for me to see.  (Yes I will probably go see Ticket to Brasil too because who can resist bossa nova, whatever, posting about this one first)

Halloween, Alaska is not a new band to me.  I’ve heard their stuff, enjoy the beats, all that.  Yet I’d not heard them live nor had I gone to concert completely alone in a very long time.  Yes alone – me, my camera, and a library book hanging out in the plaza at sunset.

As the band warmed up, the plaza filled with couples and groups – grabbing snacks from the vendors around the area, settling into plastic chairs and the concrete risers.  Patrons from the concert inside Orchestra Hall streamed out to be greeted by these guys from around town and their indie rock goodness.  The smooth melodies and eccentric beat filled the air – it’s a sound I really don’t tire of.

Sitting alone at a concert allows you to envelope yourself in the sound, no worries to what your companion is doing or thinking.  I found myself focused on the drummer most of the night and how his joy of his art radiated under the white canopy.   I could feel his energy from my concrete seat.  I found myself smiling along through the entire set.  For this reason alone I think I will pick up their newest album the next time I’m at the Electric Fetus.  I could use more chill music in my collection.

I did spend the time playing with the new camera reminding myself how little I know about aperature and focus and megapixels and shooting at night.  As such, the photos of me at the venue were horrific (if not just shots of blurry darkness).  The four photos in this post are truly the only that turned out of the 89 photos I shot that night.  Less than 5% success rate.  Eh, I’m learning right?

So I leave you with my final shot of downtown – 12th St & Nicollet Ave around 10:30p on a gorgeous Friday night.

With that, however, I must say that the tools I’ve been using for the last howevermanyyears have died.  My handy Canon A series I received as a gift so many years ago died last year.  I was rocking out with a hand-me-down from my sister after that even though the camera never felt right.  My mother-in-law gifted us a beautiful SLR with lenses though its film and hard to lug around.  The right tools for me?  Not at all.

Last week I purchased this baby.  It arrived in the mail today – brand new FujiFilm Finepix S1800.  The best camera?  Nope – just a huge upgrade (mostly because it works when you hit the buttons).  I’ve wanted to replace my tools for over a year…  just took me a while to do it.

After screwing around with it a bit – I declare this to be the first real photo taken with the camera:

She really is a good dog, eh?

And with that – I am off to photograph yet another adventure!

Now, I ride the bus all the time.  It’s my primary mode of transportation – easy, convenient – I am the first to tell others to “take the bus – it’s easy!”.

So choosing which route to take was difficult.  Do I do something I’ve done before?  Something totally new?  How much time to I really have for this anyway?  And then thought – I could do it all and just finally ride my commuter route the entire length – the #113.

The 113 – LTD Stop – Grand Ave S – Lyndale Ave S – UofM route is my everyday bus.  Yet I’d not thought about it at all other than “gotta catch the 7:20a bus and go to work”.  This exercise changed it a bit.

Undergraduate students, graduate students, post-docs, staff, administrators, professors, and researchers ride this route.  Sometimes the bus is silent, other times deep conversations occur about the current research topics.

We travel through the U of M East Bank Campus, West Bank Campus and onto the highway.  Traffic is stopped around the bus, surrounded by rusting guard rails, construction, and blue skies.

The bus is a double with cushier seats than the regular local routes.  Folks get comfy for the ride – which lasts me about 12 minutes normally.

Folks carry everything on the bus – the normal stuff like newspapers, textbooks, and bags.  But then other everyday things like this young woman carrying a sack of fresh green onions home from the summer UMN Farmer’s Market.

What surprised me the most was really looking at how people passed the time on this bus they rode every day – newspapers were far more prevalent than I expected.  While I keep to my NPR podcasts most of the time, others rifle through national papers searching for news and research that interests them.  Magazines are second – copies of The New Yorker are found in the aisle at times.  And they say print media is dead…  well it might be in other places, just not on the 113.

An adventure in exploring your surroundings, beliefs, and self in a summer in Minneapolis.

These episodes are created to allow the participants to explore their surroundings in a safe manner with a period of reflection.  Participants run the risk of finding things they enjoy, learning new skills, and potentially finding gainful employment.

Each episode will be sent via email to participants with a description, photography cues, and a few questions to answer in writing.  Episodes will have deadlines to them when they will be expected to be completed and reported on.

Episode reports are to be posted to your Facebook profile by the deadline and shared with other participants in the adventure as well as other family and friends you deem appropriate.  They can also be posted in other online spaces such as a personal website if you wish to have them in multiple locations.

If all 20 episodes are completed within their deadlines, participants will receive not only the sense of accomplishment for getting out there and “doing something”, but also a yet-to-be-determined prize (soliciting sponsors now).

Preview Episode was Roller Skating at the Roller Garden.  Remember this adventure as we move along through the series.

So – are you interested in trying out something new?  Something exciting?  Drop me a line and we’ll add you to the list of participants.  You know that you want to travel down that road – you know, the one Frost wrote about.

Week 5 was bountiful as always.  The photo includes the produce in the box as well as a few items we picked up at the Wedge to round out the meal.

Notice the little brown bag in the back?  Birchwood Cafe granola.  Yum.  Week 5 left us with a changing of the team.  Due to a toddler who decided it was better to go to bed at 6:30p, one of the households had to drop from the experiment.  No problems whatsoever because this summer is just that – an experiment.  Didn’t work for them.  Next summer should be better when Mr. Abi is 3.

So week 6.  Ah, challenging week 6.  The replacement household had a canoe trip that came up last minute.  The other half of my household was sick.  Household #3 was only half there since Mr. Nick ran off to the deep south for a bit of vacation.  So two people tackling the box of food…  This box of food:

new potatoes, carrots, pearl onions, zucchini, cucumber, raspberries, broccoli, red mustard and more!  Menu set at Vegetarian Lasagna, green salad, potatoes and chives, and a Raspberry/Blackberry pie for dessert.

Now, remember how I said there were just two people cooking?  So I prepped the pie before he came over (just a pretty thing!).

Two people, cooking for tweleve, three hours on a hot Thursday evening.  Conversation was good.  Food turned out fair.  I could really use a large saucepan (one size larger than my current one).  Prepping veggies takes so much out of you.  A two-basin sink is my dream.

My co-chef left at 9:30p with his household’s worth of food.  I packed everything else up and then, well, looked a bit tired, worn out, and just hot.

So things I learned from week 6.

1. To do these meals, you need three people on kitchen duty.
2. It isn’t as fun with just two people doing the planning, shopping, prepping, cooking, cleaning, packaging, and socializing.
3. There is still food for the replacement household in my fridge – they never came to get it.  This is not acceptable.
4. My raspberry/blackberry pie needed a bit more cornstarch and sugar in the filling – was runny and a bit too tart for my taste.
5. That Thursday night left me exhausted for Friday.

I’m looking forward to week 7.  Everyone should be back in town and feeling fabulous.  Time to continue the learning of doing this community dinner thing…

Still tons of food though!

This week the box brought:

• lettuce
• sugar snap peas
• escarole
• bok choy
• turnips
• arugula
• kohlrabi

We had some radishes left over from last week and the daycare co-op sent over a pile of fresh bread.  Once again, the counters were full to the brim.  Menu a bit different too:

Italian Sausage Soup, Tofu & Bok Choy stir fry, kohlrabi with herbs, green salad, and espresso bread pudding for dessert.

Sounds good, right?  Well it was for the most part.  We were given a small kohlrabi this time, so it went into the stir fry instead of a dish on its own.  The soup was bitter – our first attempt with escarole didn’t turn out as well as planned.  So we looked it up (after cooking of course) in our handy dandy cooking chemistry book (On Food and Cooking – read it – great reference for the experimental chef) and turns out you need to cut the flavor of bitter cabbages, like escarole, with something in the onion family and salt.  Next time the soup will have more sea salt and some scallions.

The soup is excellent to dip bread in, though.  So that’s what I did.

The stir fry turned out fabulously.  Big hit all around.  That and the bread pudding.  Mmmm fresh bread pudding.

Next week I won’t be able to be around for the meal as I’m teaching an Intermediate Outdoor Cooking class at an outdoor facility that evening.  Hopefully someone will take the camera and snap a few of what was going on.  It’s the Big Guy’s turn at the menu planning – should be fun!

Last night, I attempted to ‘tweak’ my WordPress theme for my little website here and failed.  I have kept up with trends in webdesign since 1995 – until now.

It is clearly time to re-shine the space here.  Heck, I even took two artistic friends out to dinner a while back to get their input on design changes.  But I can’t do it.

So here’s the call – I am looking for help.  If any of you are talented designers who are willing to work with a perfectionist with little extra time on her hands and like to take amateur photos (that’s me), please drop me a line in the comments.

Thanks everyone!

Here’s the deal.  The Big Guy and I (+ 4 other adults + 1 toddler) purchased a share of the Riverbend Farm this summer.  We thought, “hey, we like food.  We like good cheap food.  We like the idea of supporting the local farmers.  We like adventure” so we jumped in.  As its our first year into it, we didn’t know how much food it would truly produce.

CSA is where a person/group purchases a share of a farm for a set price.  The farm then gives that person/group a box of whatever is harvested that week.  Each week, all season long, no matter what happens.  Floods?  No food.  Awesome sun & rain?  Bounty.

Last week, our CSA started.  So the six adults (+ toddler) gathered at our house to see what was in the box, clean it up, and figure out how to eat it.  Each pot in the photo above is filled with goodies from the farm.

Week 1 gave us:

• variety of lettuces (there were 4)
• arugula
• rapini
• radishes
• sugar snap peas
• corn meal (from last year’s harvest)
• big ol’ pot of fresh herbs

Week 1 I was in charge of the menu.  Looking over the goods, I decided on a big salad of fresh greens with peas and some carrots and peppers added in, grilled radishes, and sauteed chicken & rapini.

Turns out washing and prepping that much food takes 3 people actively working for about two hours.  Then again, I also threw together a banana nut cake for dessert (well, one of the folks helped – teaching others to cook & bake is part of the plan with this).  But the feast we had last week!  Below is a photo of the salad once it was finished – it is sitting in my gigantic dutch oven:

So after eating fabulous salads for the week, the Big Guy picked up the Week 2 share on Wednesday afternoon.  This time it was another person’s turn for the menu based on these ingredients:

• variety of lettuces (just two this time)
• kohlrabi
• French Breakfast radishes
• salad turnips
• mustard greens
• arugula
• sugar snap peas
• black turtle beans (dried from last season)

This time the menu was a bit simpler – root salad, bean burritos, and then I threw in oatmeal cookies for dessert.

Thursday evening we gathered at the house (community dinners will be Thursdays from here on out, apparently) and again, two hours of prep work and we had a fabulous dinner with more than enough leftovers.

The dutch oven was filled again – the photo below was actually taken before we finished filling it:

Those are slices of turnips, jicama, peppers, and tomatoes on the top of the greens.  That salad was HEAVY and ever so yummy.  In fact, I had another bowl of it today for lunch.  We served it with a greek vinnagarette which was just perfect.

The CSA is supposed to go well into fall.  I will do my best to keep photos and contents going on the site here to document the food adventure!

The flowers are blooming around the house!  Some serious hard work on the lilac bushes paid off.  They were being choked out by a vine and were overgrown when we moved in.  So we dug and cut and cut and cut some more.  So much that they looked thin by the end of last summer.  Oh goodness did it work!

The blossoms are just now starting to open up.  Our yard is about to be filled with fresh lilac scent.  The bushes on the outside of the fence are producing super dense blossoms – we’ll see how it looks once they open completely – see for yourself:

The last two months have been full of work, graduate school, training, volunteer work, swimming, playing with the dog, painting, travel…and yes, running off into the woods for a few days.  I have piles of photos to sort through once things calm down a bit – until then, let me leave you with a photo taken with my blackberry yesterday in St. Paul.  I have done absolutely no edits to this photo and the wind made it turn out kinda cool.  So enjoy a snapshot of the MN State Capitol and sit tight while I finish up the semester of school.