AAAGH IT'S SEPTEMBER!!!!

So I read this post at the No More Mr. Nice Pie this afternoon and as I read it it finally sank in to my summer-lovin' skull that yes, really, it's September and the peaches and corn won't be around much longer. NOOOO! With a 3-day weekend it's always OK to leave early (I'd been wrapping things up anyways), so I dashed right off to the Union Square greenmarket. I may have had a slight case of eyesbiggerthanstomachitis, though.

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thinking peaches and mozzarella for breakfast. yum.

update: 9/2/2017 with watermelon and kalua pig. Yes, yum.

Say cheese!

I hadn't made cheese for a long time, but I recently helped out with a chicken-sitting stint for friends who have a backyard coop and some garden beds in their backyard, and I had one beautiful orange tomato left, and I'd been wanting to see how mozzarella made from this delicious Jersey cow milk from Ithaca that they sometimes have at the local food coop would be.

Answer: pretty darned good.

To borrow from my own FB post - you have to admire the first person way back when who looked at milk that was in the first steps of the cheesification process and actually figured out that this wasn't as bad as it looked!

Warming slowly. Citric acid was added at 85 degrees and that's started things separating, the milk is now approaching 100 degrees and time for the rennet.

Curds and whey. If you ever wondered exactly what Little Miss Muffet was eating, now you know. It starts out a little tidier, but I've started scooping out the curds into a colander for draining. 

Ready for draining

Mostly drained

Broken up for heating in the whey. You can heat in a microwave, too, but mine (an ancient Half-Pint, with an actual turning dial for timing instead of the normal modern keypad, inherited from a departing housemate back in the 90's) broke last winter and I've found I don't really miss it that much. 

Cheese!

Unfortunately no fresh basil, but I did have some around drying and that worked OK. Nice bedtime snack.

BTW if you are interested in cheesemaking, I've been pretty happy with the 2 kits I started out with: a mozzarella kit from Roaring Brook Dairy and a basic cheesemaking kit from New England Cheesemaking Supply. The New England Cheesemaking Supply site is really beginner-friendly, with a whole how-to section. When I'm ready for a resupply, I'll probably just hit Murray's Cheese and get the components individually, but it was nice to start with a kit with everything you need plus good clear instructions. (ps these are unpaid plugs, just things/stores I've tried and been happy with). 

So far I've only tried mozzarella and cottage cheese. Maybe someday I'll try something that takes aging but for now I've been happy with the instant-gratification cheeses. Cottage cheese is ridiculously easy, although the first time I made it I had to get up at 4 am to finish it because I didn't read the instructions all the way through and got to the part where it said "Now turn off the stove and put the lid on the pot and let it sit for 6 hours" at 10 pm - oops! Was good, though. Mozzarella feels a little more involved because there is heating and kneading involved, but it's so cool when all the sudden the curd turns into recognizable "mootz", and the result is pretty good - OK, not as good as what I can get at any of the local Italian specialty markets but I do really enjoy the making, it's a fun messing-about-in-the-kitchen project.

 

Not Brooklyn

Historic Aircraft Restoration Project/Hangar B Ranger Tour Paddle (Floyd Bennett Field)

We've been making an effort at the Sebago Canoe Club to add more trips suitable for anyone here as the summer is winding down. Last Spring, we lost our wonderful commodore emeritus and sea kayak chair Tony Pignatello to cancer, and we're feeling his absence deeply at the club - he was such an amazingly warm and welcoming person and he did so much to make sure that new members felt like they'd found the place they'd been looking for all along. He was a great trip leader and always watched out for the less experienced paddlers, he had this beautifully calm style of keeping his groups in good order and making sure everybody was doing OK, being very clear about where our next break would be and then making sure everybody got a chance to rest when we got there. One common mistake in trip leading is to hold the front of the group until the folks at the back catch up, and then start paddling again when they do, when it's the poor folks at the back who might really want to have a break for a minute - Tony never did that to people, you knew everything was going to be OK when you were on one of his trips, and you also knew that there was a good chance that you would all end up drinking some of his box wine and talking story afterwards (the post I linked his name to was just classic Tony, just how things were when he was there). He was a marvelous leader and we miss him very much.

Without him serving as a one-man welcoming committee for the club (well, not really one-man, his lovely wife Fran was part of the team, she's also an amazing person), the rest of us are trying to step up a little more to make sure that our newer and/or less experienced members are made welcome, and I was delighted to come up with an offering last weekend that was interesting and unusual while also being doable for just about anyone. The paddle was a short one, just about three miles each way, mostly along the shoreline, and the destination was Hangar B at neighboring Floyd Bennett Field, part of the National Park Service's Gateway Recreation Area.

I'd actually been plotting this trip for a long time. Hangar B houses a great program called the Historic Aircraft Restoration Project (H.A.R.P.), a dedicated group of volunteers who restore and maintain old planes and helicopters and also build full-sized models (non-flying) for the collection. I found out about it when I went out paddling back in 2008 with a few friends from Sebago; I can't remember who had the idea to stop at Hangar B but my jaw dropped when we walked in there. I'd been back a couple of times and I'd long had it in mind that it would be really neat to see if I could line up a tour of the place and the planes by someone knowledgeable.

That idea got put on the back burner for a while when the hangar had to be closed for a while for roof repairs, but when I heard they'd re-opened, I started thinking about it again. The head ranger at Floyd Bennett Field is a paddler himself, he's a really good guy and a good friend of Sebago's; earlier this summer I fortuitously ran into him out on the water and ran this idea past him. Well, it turns out that there didn't need to be any "lining up" done for a tour - there's a guided ranger tour every Sunday during the summer. Starts at 2, lasts about 2 hours; currents last Sunday were perfect, so I figured out the schedule and announced it on the Google group and ended up with a group of 17 up for it!

It ended up being a really good tour; our tour guide, Ranger Lincoln, was incredibly knowledgeable and enthusiastic about sharing what he knew about the aircraft and the facility. He took us around the various aircraft in chronological order, telling about each aircraft and then tying it in with what would have been going on at Floyd Bennett Field at that time. I'd thoroughly enjoyed just walking around and seeing the planes and reading the information provided on my earlier visits, but the ranger's approach gave so much more depth and historical perspective. As a special bonus, on the ranger tour, you get to board the Coast Guard rescue helicopter they have in the collection, you learn some interesting stuff about the development of the helicopter as a rescue craft, and the ranger demonstrates how the winch operator actually runs the show during the lowering and lifting phase of a rescue. As I said to my friends, I sincerely hope that's the closest view any of us ever get of how a Coast Guard rescue works (and I got some "Amen to that" responses). Really interesting to see, though!

I enjoyed the visit very much, and it seemed others did too. It's a really good introduction to one aspect of the area's history, and I think I'm going to make this a regular thing, once a summer at least.

Sound interesting? You don't need a boat to get there, here's the information on the NPS website.

And here are some pictures, of course. Fun place for picture taking. As usual, click on any picture for a slideshow view. Enjoy!

Eclipse Nerd

Late night at work tonight, not likely to get to my Hangar B trip report tonight. In lieu of that, here is a picture a co-worker took of me using my handy-dandy mailing-label-and-sketchbook pinhole projector to view the eclipse.

The glasses are definitely better. 

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(kayak smiley, patent pending)

Eclipsin' NYC!

Goofy eclipse selfie after a co-worker loaned me her Warby Parker freebie glasses when she went back to her desk. 

Today's planned trip report for the Floyd Bennett Field Hangar B Ranger Tour paddle I led on Sunday is being postponed in favor of jumping in on today's US eclipse fever. I couldn't make it to anywhere with totality, or even to one of the official viewing events that were going on here and there in the city, but I did make sure I went downstairs to see it.

I first saw it through handy-dandy pinhole projector made from a large mailing label projecting on a sketchbook (kindly demonstrated for the photos by a gentleman who saw me trying to balance the sketchbook on a ledge at the right angle so to free up one hand to take the picture), then through a pair of the Warby Parker freebie eclipse glasses that a co-worker loaned me when she went back in to work. The glasses are actually really cool, I will get my own pair before 2024.

It was quite the event at Scholastic, Mrs. Frizzle would've been proud of us as the entire office emptied out onto Broadway starting around 2:30 to view the maximum coverage at 2:44, using every variety of viewer out there - we had the glasses, the box viewers, and the simple two sheets of paper. No colanders, but pretty much everything else. I got some fun pictures of folks using their various devices, and then, in an unexpected bonus, the cloud cover was JUST thick enough at certain points to act as a filter allowing photos to be taken actually the moon covering 72% of the sun. VERY neat! I'd thrown my camera in my bag as sort of an afterthought this morning but hadn't made any provisions for actual solar photos, thinking more that eclipse-watchers in the streets of NYC might offer some interesting pictures. You can see how that worked out below - as usual, click on any picture for a slideshow view.

Interesting thing was that it was noticeably gloomy, but not as dark as I thought 72% coverage would have made it. I'm glad I was able to get out there for this event. 

A Perfect Day at Coney Island - Yoga, A Swim, and a Sand Castle Contest

Swimming selfie with parachute jump

And what a perfect summer day I had at Coney Island today. Started with yoga on the beach led by one of the CIBBOWS members, followed that with a swim that was just a hair short of a mile (unfortunately had some foot cramp problems but was able to work through them), then enjoyed a little time hanging out by Grimaldo's Chair (Click here to read a very good article about the lifeguard after whom the chair is named - sad story but there's a lot of love there) catching up with some of my swimmer friends.

After that I headed down the beach to check out the sandcastle contest; that ran from 12 to 4 and a lot of the builders were just getting started, but there was some neat stuff going on already.

Pictures below - starts with yoga, then a few photos of the clinics that CIBBOWS was running today, then a mysterious bunch of bananas that was floating around (actually there was a whole fruit salad out there, bananas, a pear, a strawberry, some sugar cane) - maybe if I'd eaten one my foot cramps would've been better. Should've drunk more water before I started, too.

Finishes with my walk down the beach and some of the sandcastles and other sand sculptures that were being created. Pretty cool stuff, next year I'll know to go later when people are closer to done, I'd had enough sun by this point and was ready to head home, but what was there so far was pretty neat.

Finished my Coney Island day with a couple of corndogs - one of my biggest junk food weaknesses! - and a small lemonade at Nathan's. I'm only a little bit sunburned, I think I'll sleep well and I'm looking forward to tomorrow's fun!

As usual, click on any photo for a slideshow view.