The New Blue Babies

I have two new girls to add to the family.  They are purebred Ameraucana chickens and are the sweetest, gentlest chickens I've ever owned.  They will lay pure blue eggs (once they start laying eggs).  This breed comes in different color variations but my favorite is what is referred to as "blue" which is what these babies are.  Belle is on the left and Abigail on the right.  As they get old enough to lay eggs, I will be replacing the others who are a bit too much for me to handle, with more Ameraucana's.  I think there is a huge difference between pure bred, locally raised and the baby chicks you buy through a mail order house or get at the local feed supply store (which came from a mail order house). There is no comparison to the difference in their personalites and gentle and calm demeanor compared to the others who are just hyper and amazingly destructive.

I know there is a pecking order but the bigger hens are just plain mean and obnoxious to these blue babies so their days are numbered here.  They are not quite a year old themselves, so I will have no problem finding them a home since the city ordinance in Sarasota has been passed to allow backyard chickens.

Follow up:  Belle laid her first egg and it's a beauty!

It's Sand Sculpting Season Again!

This year the Siesta Key Crystal Classic is hosting the World Championship Doubles Division of sand sculpting for 2011.  There is no specific theme so you can make whatever you want.  Here are some of the entries and the winner.

And The Winner Is

Art in the Streets

The Chalk Festival has decended upon Sarasota once again and the streets are filling up with chalk paintings of enormous proportions, some taking up nearly a city block!  This year a new aspect of the chalk festival was added called Going Vertical.  It includes numerous works of art on walls around town and not just on the streets. The artists come to Sarasota from all over the world to compete and show off their talents as street artists.  Here are some of my favorites:

The photo above is all painted onto the side of a building and what you see is all painted!

Seeing Blue Again

If you've been following my blog, you will already know my passion for wild mushrooms and to be even more specific, my affinity for blue mushrooms.  I posted a while back about my quest for the blue Entoloma of New Zealand but there was still one blue mushroom I still had not yet found.  I'd only seen it in photos and having lived for so many years west of the Mississippi, I had no chance to ever find it unless I spent some time mushrooming in the east.  Now that I am living in the east once again, I have opportunities to learn a whole new host of mushrooms I know little about and have never seen before.

Here in SW Florida, on the Gulf Coast, the Lactarius indigo mushroom is known to grow fairly regularly, but I am still learning habitat here and having a difficult time finding much of a mix in trees other than oak, oak, oak.  Yes, there are some pines here and there, but they never seem to be together around where I am.

I have a favorite spot that seems to produce the most mushrooms after good soaking rains, but the one spot I'd been told does produce this blue mushroom has never produced much of anything and I'm getting tired of driving all the way there just to find nothing!  So, I'd been walking around my usual haunt and finding some new and unusual species of mushrooms which I was having difficulty identifying.

Florida fungi is quite unusual for the most part because the genus and species of many of the mushrooms here are that of tropical mushrooms seen in places like Mexico and South America etc.  I'd been there on a Friday photographing and hiking but decided to go back the following Tuesday to get more info on a few specimens I had seen but didn't collect.  I was quite surprised to see that some of the mushrooms I'd found only a few days earlier had completely dried up and others that I wanted to collect, were just gone!  I walked around in the exact same spots I'd been before and found nothing, until all of a sudden I walked into an area where I thought I had seen some baby reishi mushooms and low and behold, what did I see, but three of the most gorgeous blue mushrooms.  There they were, just as plain as day, Lactarius indigo!  Finally, I found them.  They are just the most beautiful color although I have seen specimens in books that are very vivid colors, these were a bit more subdued.  I am hoping with the good soaking rains we have had the last few days, that more will emerge and perhaps the damper, fresher specimens will be a bit darker and more vivid in color.

Lactarius is a genus of mushrooms commonly knows as milk caps (lactose = milk) and when the gills of these mushrooms are cut, they exude a milky substance or latex hence the name.  This particular one exudes an indigo blue latex so that is how it got its name.  These specimens were a little on the dry side so not so much latex.

Making Ricotta Cheese at Home

There is really no big secret to making home made ricotta cheese.  It is just milk, cream, vinegar or even buttermilk and that's it.  I have made this several times using different recipes and they are all equally as simple to make and just as good.  This latest batch was David Lebovitz' recipe which calls for milk, cream, yogurt, vinegar and salt.

First combine two quarts of whole milk (I used fresh raw whole milk from a local dairy), one cup of whole-milk plain yogurt, 1/2 cup of heavy cream (optional), 2 teaspoons of white vinegar and 1 teaspoon of salt in a heavy pot and bring to a boil.  Gently boil for 1-2 minutes until a "raft" forms on the surface and the milk starts to curdle.

After the two minutes are up, I turn the burner off and let the pot sit for 15 minutes or so to cool and then spoon the curds into a cheesecloth lined sieve to drain.

Pour off the rest of the liquid through the cheese cloth, squeeze out any excess liquid and refridgerate.  I leave the cheese in the cheesecloth in the fridge until firm and then either use it right away or tranfer to a sealed tub.  This should keep up to 3-4 days but it never lasts that long around here!

The Little Tunny Have Arrived

My friend Al White who is a captain/fishing guide in Florida near where I live invited me to go fishing the other day and how could I dare say no?  I've been anxious to get out for ages and now that my hand is mostly healed (well, almost), I wanted to go so that's just what we did.

We launched the boat out of Charlotte Harbor near Boca Grande and set out in search of big balls of bait being crashed by hungry fish.  The first pod was full of mackerel crashing bait near the surface.  Every time a fish would come thrashing through, the bait would jump clear out of the water trying to get away from the jaws about to encompass them.  It was a sight to behold...I've seen this in Baja when we were fishing the Sea of Cortez and it's always an exciting sight to see.

We were soon into fish and both of us hooked and released several mack's until I had a fish on that was for certain, no mackerel!  It peeled off line like a marlin and I knew instantly I was hooked into a false albacore, affectionately referred to as little tunny.  They are a member of the tuna family and are solid muscle and built like torpedo's hence they are super strong and will give you a real run for your money.  Super fun on a fly rod!  My first little tunny of the day, I had Capt. Al hold it so I could get a proper photo using my good 35mm SLR which I didn't want his fishy, salty hands on...so, he is holding my fish.  I guess that's just the way it is when you are the photographer and either can't trust anyone to take a decent photo or don't want anyone touching your expensive camera so C'est la vie.

I shot a short video of the albies crashing bait and this was what we were surrounded by all morning!  What a hoot!

The flies we were using were immitating what are called Cuban anchovies and they are only an inch and a half long.  It's amazing out of that huge ball of bait that a fish could spot our fly and eat it but that's just what they did.  One of the fish we caught regurgitated a bunch of bait fish so I was able to get a photo of the bait next to our fly showing the similarities.

I was using an 8 weight rod with an intermediate sinking tip fly line but I should have been using a 9 or 10 weight for these fish as I was very under equipped for the strength of the false albacore.  I use an 11 weight when fishing them in Loreto.  Next time I'll bring a heavier rod!
All in all a very fun day and we both landed lots of fish.  We were back off the water by around 1:30 or 2:00 pm and back at the house having a cold beer.  Great day on the water.  I'm already ready for another trip.  Maybe this Friday?

Road Tripping for Mushrooms

Maggie the Wonder Dog and I needed a break from the Florida heat and humidity and feeling very mushroom deprived, we decided to head out on a road trip up north where Autumn is in full swing and the mushrooms are popping all over.  This year is producing a bumper crop of mushrooms thanks to Hurricane Irene and tropical storm Lee.  Pennsylvania and the Northeast are in the zone for some of the best mushrooming to be seen in decades.

We were heading to Southcentral Pennsylvania and our route took us through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia before reaching our destination.  While stopped for a "potty" break for Maggie, we took a stroll through the woods at the Virginia welcome center and found a bunch of gorgeous Amanitas. Since most of my mushroom hunting and species knowledge is based on mushrooms west of the Mississippi, I am new to eastern species so bear with me while I mutter my way through this.

Driving through the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia, we crossed over The New River Gorge Bridge, the longest single span arch bridge in the US.  We stopped so I could take a photo of it since you can't see anything when you are actually ON the bridge.  It's quite a beauty!

The first day in Pennsylvania was rainy all day.  That makes for wet mushrooms, wet people, wet dogs and wet camera equipment, so suffice to say, I did not take too many photos that day.  I did manage a few with my iPhone though!  The weather did improve as the week progressed so I did manage to get some photos of the vast variety of mushroom species out there in the woods.  I am not accustomed to walking in deciduous, hardwood forests and these mushrooms are foreign to me by comparison to west coast mushrooms, Pacific Northwest mushrooms and those I found in SW Montana so the variety available to me was astounding!

Here are some photos to give you an idea of what a mushroom fairyland I was visiting:

The last day I really wanted to go searching for paw paws and had heard there was to be a paw paw festival in Paw Paw, West Virginia, so my friend and I took off for a day trip to Paw Paw to the festival.  Unfortunately, when we got there, we were told the festival does not take place anymore and hasn't for a few years (don't believe what you read online!!!) so we were out of luck.  So, not to be a total loss, we drove around town, marvelling at all the paw paw trees (Asimina triloba) and found some paw paws growing on a tree outside the front door of the post office.  We picked all we could reach and ate some right away!  Mmmm tasty!