Along the Loneliest Highway

 

Last December when I was asking the Geek whether we should invite some friends over for New Year's Eve he responded "What about if we take a road trip - to the Southwest?". I was completely surprised since we had just come back from Germany a few weeks before, but then I quickly became very excited. We used to go to the Southwest fairly often, mostly in the winter or early spring. We hadn't been there since 2019 and we were both eager to see one of our most favorite parts of the US again.

We left on a Saturday late in the morning because our first destination - Fallon in Nevada - is only a five to six hours drive away and we figured we would still arive by daylight. I had had a very annoying cough, but was pretty sure that I didn't have COVID. However, I decided to do a test just to be on the safe side and as I expected it was negative. 

Once we had passed Sacramento, traffic became significantly lighter. The drive on I-80 over the Sierra is always beautiful, no matter the season. The rain eventually turned into snow once we were at almost 5000 ft (~1520 m) altitude. Driving down to Reno is simply spectacular. We arrived in Fallon in the early evening, checked into our hotel and found a Vietnamese restaurant where we had some delicious Pho.

The following day was spent driving NV highway 50, the supposedly "loneliest highway in the US". It sure is pretty lonely, but that is something we like a lot. No tailgaiting cars - there's enough space for passing. It's very relaxed driving. The weather wasn't so wonderful, though - we had rain, snow and very low clouds. Sometimes the sky was rather dramatic. But who is looking for gorgeous weather in December?

Even though we had often taken this highway, there were still places we hadn't seen before. Our first stop was at Sand Mountain.

Sand Mountain is not a mountain but an enormous sand dune that unfortunately showed a lot of ATV traces. It is so sad that everything needs to be accessed by people in obnoxiously loud vehicles. Thankfully at this time of year no one was here, the RV campground was deserted, but there was still a lot of garbage lying around. It is so sad that you find trash almost everywhere in this country. What is so difficult about putting it in a trash can or taking it home again?

In the distance we could see a salt lake.

Then it was back on the highway again, an endless line to the horizon.

Whenever we stopped - either for nature's call or just to enjoy the view - I was delighted by all the desert plants.

On the side of the road we came upon a shoe tree. Now I admit that I don't understand the sense or meaning of a shoe tree. Can someone help me out? Why toss shoes in a tree? Or let them rot at the base of the tree together with lots of garbage? Ugh!

However, the area near it was quite nice with beautiful views to the mountains in the distance.

On we went toward these snow covered mountains.

A few hours later, these mountains were in our rear view mirror. Oh, there's even another car on the road!

We arrived in Ely in the late afternoon, checked into our hotel and then drove out to a site that I will write about in my next post.

Now I need a drink for Bleubeard and Elizabeth's T Tuesday. We enjoyed a Hefeweizen yesterday with dinner. Now that we're getting closer to Oktoberfest, Costco is carrying Bavarian Weißbier again. We bought several cases...

Prost!

Little Wonders in the Garden

 

Whenever I go outside and spend some time in my garden, looking at my plants, I often see a lot of "small stuff" that I call the little wonders. It can be a spider web, an insect, a seed. Whatever it is, it belongs in my garden and is just as important and interesting as the "showy" bigger things. Like that beautiful Flame Skimmer (Libellula saturata) in the top photo. It is a dragonfly that is the most common in my garden.

This spring I noticed a higher number than usual of emerging crickets. They are always stunning when they just emerge - look at those beautiful turquoise transparent wings. It doesn't take long and all the brilliance is gone.

I wasn't successful in figuring out what kind of caterpillar (if any) this one was that I discovered on my lupines (Lupinus). I first thought it might a Painted Lady caterpillar, but I am not sure at all. A couple days later the leaves of the plant looked like in the right photo. The entire plant slowly died.

Neither could I identify the little visitor on my red-flowered Buckwheat (Eriogonum grande). Small feathers like the one in the left photo I found throughout the garden, and bigger ones as well.

St. Catherine's Lace (Eriogonum giganteum) attracts all kinds of insects. Bees love it, but so does the Elegant Grass-carrying wasp (Isodontia elegans).

When you start to look for bugs, you see many of them. From left to right: Cribate Weevil (Otiorhynchus cribricollis), Largus californicus adult and as a nymph. I also call them love bugs because they seem to mate all the time. Quite a suprise to find a solitairy one on my sliding door.

Ladybugs are always welcome since they are hungry for aphids and eat lots of them. I think that's some kind of hoverfly on my ground morning glory.

More bees, this time on my Coyote Mint (Monardella villosa). I don't know the exact identification of the flies in the photo after that.

I'm not quite sure what's going on here. I saw this amount of (dead?) bees only on one of my Verbena bonariensis.

And look at those beauties here - California pipevine swallowtail (Battus philenor hirsuta) and Gulf Fritillary (Agraulis vanillae) in top photo and Mournful Duskywing (Erynnis tristis).

There are many many spiders in my garden, but most of the time I only see their beautiful artwork and what they catch within it.

Garden snails, on the other hand, are not turning up in big numbers. They have proven to be quite the climbers.

This year there are more Western fence lizards than usual sunnying in my garden. This one scaled up the screen on our sliding door.

A decaying pine cone. I don't have pine trees, but years ago, when we were still living further up the hill, my neighbor brought me a bag of pine cones from the Sierras. I believe this is a Jeffrey pine cone (Pinus jeffreyi).

Last but certainly not least, these beautiful seeds are found hanging in different locations, where the wind has blown them. I think they might be seeds of Salsify - and hope that I'm mistaken

I had Salsify in my garden three years ago and since then have worked hard to get rid of them by either digging up the plants or cutting off the truly showy seedheads as soon as possible. The flower is star-shaped, but the seedheads are real showstoppers. Unfortunately they are very invasive in a garden setting, even in a native and/or wildflower garden. You can see a photo of both flower and seedhead below.

Hopefully with all these tiny faces, this post qualifies for Nicole's Friday Face Off.

Busy in the Kitchen

 

This is a shorter post again since this is another busy week for me. I'm getting a bit tired of this and look forward to some slower times. Hopefully soon.

Cooking in the summer is not my most favorite thing to do, especially when it is hot. However, this year it didn't get hot until August and even then there weren't too many days with temperatures over 90F (32 C). Still, I had many days when I didn't completely enjoy cooking - and you know, usually I do. This was a bit of a surprise to me that the lackluster mood lasted for such a long time.

Nevertheless, I was busy in the kitchen. The cooler season was sent out the door with a delicious chili that you can see in the top picture. Another favorite with my family is lemon chicken with orecchiette; this time I added shiitake mushrooms which I got from my trusted "mushroom man" at the farmers market. I used chicken breast and I think this was the last time I used that. Chicken breast is just boring, becomes dry way too fast and doesn't have much flavor. Next time I will go back to boneless skinless chicken thighs.

Another evening I made creamy chicken with lemon and thyme. I had seen something similar somewhere (I can't remember where) and decided to just wing it. I added cremini and we had pasta with it. It was quite good. Chicken seems to be the only meat we still eat apart from ground beef every now and then.

Another chicken recipe I made just a few days ago since I wanted to use fresh tomatoes and nothing out of a can (I'm not a big fan of canned tomatoes). This is tomato basil chicken breast, a recipe I found in NYT cooking, and here the chicken breast worked very well. It was a very delicious dinner. It was asking for capers and red wine vinegar which I simply omitted. You can find the recipe here.

Surprisingly I did quite some baking - I'm not a big baker apart from baking bread. I don't like that you have to be pretty precise when baking and that is not something I enjoy too much. At least not in the kitchen. At "cherry time" I made a cherry almond clafoutis, using almond flour instead of regular APF. The recipe (here) also asks for almond milk which I don't have, so I used regular whole milk and instead of cornstarch I used potato starch.

You can make this also with other fruit; I tried it with plums once and it was very tasty. This is a lovely recipe that I have done several times. But then I found a raspberry almond clafoutis in NYT cooking, a little bit different, but also with almond flour. I first was a bit skeptical about the measurements because I thought it was a lot of liquid and the raspberries are moist as well. If I would have followed their baking time (30-35 minutes) it would have been a mess, however, I baked it for 45-50 minutes and it was perfect!

At the farmers market I bought super delicious blueberries and thought about what to do with them. In an AARP bulletin (of all magazines!) I saw blueberry oatmeal cakes and thought that was interesting. Maple syrup instead of sugar (I hope David will be delighted that every now and then I do use maple syrup), soaked rolled oats instead of flour and almost no extra fat except for two TB of canola oil - a real winner. It helps that the blueberries are delicious and not your usual supermarket fare. I freeze these and we pull them out whenever we want. Great for the Geek to take to work.

Of course I made several jars of tomato sauce that I put in the freezer, but I also made 15 jars of raspberry preserve as well as several jars of apple sauce (which I freeze) because my neighbor gave me a good amount of her apples.

Those peaches from the farmers market were to die for! Peaches are my favorite summer fruit, sweet and juicy. When the juice runs down your arms while you eat them over the sink (in order not to make too big of a mess) they are just right!

Of course I baked bread, hearty whole wheat bread. I'm still experimenting with the recipe, tweaking it until I finally will get a loaf with the perfect amount of moisture.

Do you have a favorite summer dinner? Ours is caprese with tomatoes and basil from our garden. We always take turns who gets the "tower" in the middle.

With it we enjoy a lovely summer drink - fresh strawberries in dry Riesling. Cheers!

This is for Bleubeard and Elizabeth's T Tuesday.

Augustbreak

 

This past August I joined Susannah Conway's Augustbreak again, and this was the first time that I posted photos for each prompt. Usually there are some prompts that I just skip, but this time I tried to find something to post every day. 

I did feel like August was just flying by - if I didn't have these pictures, I might think it didn't even happen. I didn't use the prompts for taking photos, but often going through my archive, which is always fun since I'm stumbling over photos I had completely forgotten about. 

You see the prompts above and my take on them below.

There are a few faces here - especially little Kibeau's right on top - so I link to Nicole's Friday Face Off.

Sorry for the extremely short post today - I feel like time is running away from me! September already - really! Have a delightful weekend, everyone!