Enjoying a balloon launch, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

I had another really full weekend, one of those times where you need a weekend to recover from your weekend? :-) I managed to cram in: book discussion group at a bookstore, going to the movies, going to a hot air balloon festival, attending a graduation party and a horse show, riding my bike on a 20-mile ride, AND spending a few hours catching up on tv shows with friends. In addition to the usual horse duties. Whew! I am amazed that it all went off without a hitch; the timing was pretty good. And thank heavens for caffeine.

Friday night I went to Rollie's

Mary Campbell "cave", originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

This week's hike was gorgeous but quite scary. We went to the Gorge Metropark, part of Summit County Metroparks, and I was excited because it's one of the few local parks that I had yet to visit, even with my previous several years' of hiking jaunts. But this really wasn't good weather for it. The trail was extremely icy, underneath a light layer of powdery snow that hid the ice, and it was very rocky, so you would naturally try to walk around the little rocks for smoother footing--but the smoother footing was where the ice lay hidden! It was crazy.

These are some of the slippery stone steps we went up and down. I got most of the way down the trail, very slowly, but soon had overstretched my poor underused thigh muscles (quads?) from the constant tensing with each step to make sure I was secure, and the frequent deep squats to steady myself against a rock or tree. I was in agony for a little while, and really didn't enjoy the hike much after the first half of it. (Obviously my summer bike riding benefits have worn off by now; sigh.) Plus I was rather nervous that not only would I fall--which no one wants to do anyway--but that I would fall and land on my camera and break it (never mind hurting myself, the camera's more important! :-) I know I shouldn't bring it with me but I just can't resist, when I leave it behind I always see something I really want to photograph. Anyway, the scenery was spectacular: we hiked high above the Gorge cut by the Cuyahoga River, so the view was nice but you didn't want to step too close to that steep edge. And with me slipping and sliding a bit, and dogs on the hike too who don't always stay where you expect them to be, when we came to a particularly steep walk down the embankment I decided not to risk it.

This shows the rest of the group going down that really scary incline. My friend Greg was also having a heckuva time staying on his feet, neither of us had ice-gripper-things on our boots that some of the others wore; so we both turned around and went back, meeting up with the others back near the start. So I didn't get to go all the way down to the river's edge and see the Gorge Dam up close, which is too bad. But I know where it is, I'll go back in better conditions. It really was cool, I haven't been to a big dam like that in a long time.

I tried to get decent shots of it but peering through the trees didn't really work too well. The main attraction of this park, besides the water view, is the historical anecdote about Mary Campbell, a white girl captured by Delaware Indians and supposedly brought to a cave in what is now this park, where she lived for years before being freed. You can read about it here and at Wikipedia, and so forth. There's a lot of history and conjecture written about her. I've been hearing about her for years, and finally got to see the supposed "cave." (top photo) There's really just an overhang and some deep fissures in the rock, and further on there is a little "cave" that some of our intrepid hikers squirmed their way into.

(I was way too sore by that point, and also a wee bit hesitant, even with my flashlight.) But it's a great story. The rocks are all quite nice to walk around and over and under. We have several parks nearby with similar formations, but I hadn't seen these before. I was glad to see them in winter; I'll go back in summer when the view is completely different.


View of icicles hanging underneath a rock face, and water pouring off from above, trying to make new icicles.


After the hike we went out for lunch at Riverside Kitchen, a diner/sports bar type of place that I had never been to before. They had great hamburgers--very very thick!--and sweet potato fries, steaks, etc. But we weren't impressed with the service; maybe we just had a new waitress and a new or slacker cook, but she didn't do basic things like provide silverware and napkins for everyone, and the meals took AN HOUR and FIFTEEN MINUTES to arrive! That's ridiculuous--we were the only customers for most of that time! We opened up the place, so maybe you could give them the excuse that the grill wasn't heated up yet or something, but please. (I know, I know, they were rounding up the cows out back.) The other odd thing was that she said we'd have to share menus. Now, granted, we were a party of 12, but with NO OTHER DINERS, you'd think they had at least 12 lousy menus?? There were many many booths and tables, it was not a tiny place. I thought that was pretty lame. And I took a picture of a scary sign in the entrance that listed quite plainly what sort of attire was not allowed on premises--anything remotely gang-related. ("All hats must be worn straight ahead.") That made me pause; I had no idea gangs were a problem in this relatively small town. Those burgers must attract a helluva crowd! So it was quite an adventure. The only good thing about having to wait so long for a meal is that you have more time to converse with your fellow diners, so that was nice, getting to know folks.

A good day, though today I am limping painfully up and down my stairs, still with the sore quadriceps; glad I had the day off for President's Day and didn't have to go out anywhere. Oh, and I watched all of the Oscars telecast last night, including the last parts delayed by DVR because I had to drive home slowly through a driving snowstorm from my friend's house where I'd been watching the main show. I enjoyed it for the most part, but had problems with some of the weird directing, sound quality, and the fact that Hugh Jackman wasn't on nearly enough. :-) But YAY Slumdog Millionaire!

He is the very model of a modern Major General, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

A little late, but here are photos from the last Iron Chef party of 2009. It was a quiet affair, no big scavenger hunt or puzzle to solve as I had thought there would be (I found out that they had created a big hunt for their New Year's Eve party, which I was unable to attend. Bummer). Our hosts were in their Southern finery, and we Chefs had a simple assignment: make a barbecue sauce to go on the pork sandwiches Patti had made, AND create a side dish from one of the provided recipes or from our own creativity. My partner Diana (seen here in red and purple; we all passed the red hat around)

came up with yummy Sweet and Sassy Maple Mustard Sweet Potatoes which were fabulous--all out of her head. I can't make up a recipe to save my life; I was very impressed.

The sauces varied in temperature from Texas Tang and the spicy Strobbe-Q (one of the chefs is named Strobbe), to our milder chunkier Fiddle Dee Dee BQ, which happened to get the most votes. Cool! After dinner we played movie trivia again, using the cool powerpoint remotes.

I totally bombed at it, but it was a ton of fun. I am saddened that we have to wait a whole year for the next series of Iron Chefs. Hopefully they will host a Summer Edition, which I missed last year. Tasty recipes to everyone, and, Tomorrow Is Another Day!

Lamb with Couscous, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

This week's edition of Iron Chef featured a Casablanca theme, and so we made a Moroccan meal: lamb with couscous; a German meal:


schnitzel with noodles (because we didn't have this last week for Sound of Music, I was very happy to see it this week); and a French dish:


bleu cheese soufle. They were all delicious. My friend

hklbry

came along this time, and did a great job of coordinating the soufle making. (Basically she issued orders, and I obeyed :-) We also had some help from the feline chefs in the household.


Our host was of course, Rick from Rick's Place:


After we had tasted all of the food and voted for our favorite--I think the schnitzel won, but I don't remember for sure--we played a casablanca movie trivia game, where all of the questions were projected on the wall in an interactive powerpoint presentation.


That was a lot of fun, although I did miserably at it because I haven't seen the movie in years and hadn't had a chance to reacquaint myself before the party. But what was the most interesting was the technology we used--I've done powerpoint Jeopardy before, but I had never seen what we used to submit our answers.


They were these cool little remotes that looked like calculators. They sent a signal to Mike's laptop to register our vote; you could see up on the screen how many people had answered so far, and it counted down the seconds til "polling was closed." He uses this system at work, to give quizzes and reviews for his college students. It was so cool--I wish we'd had these when I was in school! And now, I really want one. (But he said it costs about $30 per unit, so maybe not just yet.) I would love to use this at the library for my teen Jeopardy programs. I am going to ask around to see if I could borrow a system like this from one of our local colleges. (Sometimes I borrow the academic challenge buzzers from the high school, for Battle of the Books, but that's designed for "Hey look at me! I just answered first!" competitions. This Turning Point system is for everyone to answer secretly at the same time, and then it tabulates the scores for you. Way cool and less stressful for shy kids.) Anyway, we had a lovely evening as always. The next one up will have a Titanic theme. As always, click on any photo to go to the Flickr set; there are more photos of the other meals being made, and what the trivia screens looked like.

Dessert #3: Linzer Torte (the winner), originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

It's time again for the annual Iron Chef parties, as hosted by my friends Patti and Mike. This past week the theme was The Sound of Music, and so Patti made us a delicious Austrian meal of dumplings, goulash and salad. (I didn't write down the details of the meal, but I'll get them shortly and add them here.) Then we divided into 3 teams (by unwrapping a Brown Paper Package All Tied Up With String :-), and each team made an Austrian dessert. Oh my goodness were they tasty!


I was on the Apfel Strudel team--although I didn't do a lot of cooking, just a little chopping and helping here and there. Mostly I took photos and socialized. There's such a thing as Too Many Cooks. I really liked all three desserts equally--the Kaiserschmarrn

tasted like my dad's "German pancakes" (crepes, but when we were kids that's what we called them, coz they weren't flapjacks, and if my dad made it, it must be German, not French!) only thicker. I managed not to pig out too much on them. Our strudel was an adventure:

we chopped up 3 1/2 pounds of apples, as the recipe called for, but evidently the dough didn't rise enough, because we had way too many apples for that amount of dough.


Despite stretching and pulling it as thin as we could, we left out most of the apples. So they in turn made an excellent baked apple/applesauce side dish. And our strudel was kind of holy...But we were judged mostly on taste, not presentation. (Who am I kidding--the judging is totally subjective; everyone gets 3 chips to put in the can of whichever dessert they liked. I think we mostly stuff the boxes of our own team!) The Linzer Torte people got lucky, they had a ringer! Laura had made many of them before. It was beautiful to look at as well as tasting faboo. I really wanted to wear some kind of costume, but when the weather called for Minus Fourteen, I decided not to. And while we were sitting around socializing, waiting for stuff to bake, we didn't even watch SOM after all, because Battlestar Galactica was premiering! But there were some Favorite Things scattered throughout for decor, which was fun.

I neglected to get a photo of the Warm Woolen Mittens, darn it...More photos in the set on Flickr. This week's theme will be Casablanca. Looks like the start of a beautiful recipe...

Girl in pink, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

I've just uploaded a batch of photos I took during my summer trip to Breyerfest (see also this entry and this entry)--they are a set of The Sound of Music tribute given by the Halflingers club of Wisconsin. It was the cutest, silliest thing; while the soundtrack played over the arena PA system, many many cute blond kids on tubby Halflinger ponies made grand entrances during specific songs, and they were all in costume in some way. It was a lot of fun, we were all singing along even as we giggled over the absurdity of it all. This shot is "the girl in the pale pink dress" from the Lonely Goatherd marionette song. I just marveled at the patience of this pony, for not only did he have to wear the fake lederhosen, but also perform tricks in them! Too cute. Fair warning: looking at these photos might give you a case of "earworm" as the songs get stuck in your head. :-)



This is Maria jumping to "The hills are alive..." etc.(giggle)



This is a blurry shot, but it was a wagonful of nuns going licketysplit through the arena singing about "Maria"--and this bearded nun got a roar of laughter.



Here we have "Rolf" listening as "Liesl" tells him she is "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" and all I could see was the adorable hat on the pony...




Oh, a very dramatic moment when the wagonful of German soldiers came charging in, searching for the Von Trapps who were hiding at the abbey! Oh my! :-) Okay, enough silliness for today...