Peace + joy 2 all!
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
Forest Grump
Happy what spring?
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
A Ducky Thing Happened on the Way to the Garden
Remember when I boasted last year we were getting ducks to help on the newbie homestead? How they would follow me around with gentle clucks as I tended weeds and cultivated crops*? How they would provide copious (I’ll say!) fertilizer, dig up bugs and aerate the lawn (so that’s what those nifty mudholes are for…).
Ahhhh, fuggedaboudit. What I meant to say about “waterfowl and gardening” is this:
UNCLE!!!!!!!!!!**
At first, it amuses. No matter how far from whatever dirt you’re turning, a duck will see/hear/smell the cry of the worm and power-waddle to stick her bill into the action. Forget that you’re holding a heavy-duty broadfork that would hurt mightily if encountered by a silly feathered head or delicate webbed foot. The instinctive drive to unearth annelids overwhelms whatever common sense you previously thought that waterfowl possessed. They go from cute to exasperating faster than you can say “just what we need, more vet bills!”.
*Sigh*
After running out of funny, I considered a number of duck control options that would allow me to work without hurting the birds. Could I pen them up while digging? Yeah, but chasing them down is more trouble than it’s worth. Could I put up temp fencing? Same ish. Could I distract them? (They could play Angry Birds on the iPad!) How about night gardening? I could rig some lights but what about the neighbors….hey, wait a minute! Who’s in charge here, me or the ducks???***
Grump.
In the end, my (unsatisfying) solution consisted of racing between garden beds with various hefty tools, trailing five quacking birds and risking my own neck (and other parts) in the process.
Which is what I call a real pain in the duck.
*Or is that cultivated weeds and killed crops? Only the dandelion knows for sure!
**Antique term suggesting you have had it up to here and can’t take it anymore.
***Good question.
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
Spring Broke
The calendar said Easter but the garden sure looked like Christmas. Time to head for sunnier climes!* While we were off catching rays, some wag in Ohio threatened to arrest the groundhog. Hey, Phil: Use the global weirding defense!
Are you sure you’re sure the bunny’s coming?
*When the going gets tough, the tough head to the beach!
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
Wake-Up Time
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
Window
Beyond the screen, our world.
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
The Bread Also Rises
Except for the time I got caught in one of those Friendship Bread pass-the-loaf schemes, I’ve never ever baked (crusty) bread. No loaves, no boules, no rolls, no baguettes. I guess there’s always been something intimidating in the liturgy—the proofing, the punching, the rising—the whole glossary of glutenography can scare off a kneading newbie. Yeah, I circled the idea for a couple of years and acquired a few bread-ready accouterments—pizza stone, peel, Kitchen Aid mixer. I even mastered some home-style pies but, in the end, achieving a satisfying slice seemed a bit too daunting.
Which, of course, makes no sense. I mean, what’s the prob? It’s (mostly) just yeast, flour, water and salt. Plus, bread is what humans do. Creating foldable, sliceable deliciousness from grains is, arguably, the defining feature of post-hunter/gatherer man. Until homo sapiens entered the bizarre carb phase of the Industrial Food Period, bread in all its related forms (tortilla, pita, flatbread, naan, etc.) had anchored humanity’s nutrition, connection and pleasure.
Fast-forward many millennia to a cluttered kitchen in Westchester, NY on a sunny-enough winter day. For some murky reason, I decided that That Morning–the day my friend, Laura, arrived from L.A.– would be The Day. The Day I would overcome my fear of creating rock-hard cardboard masquerading as sustenance. The Day I would proof, punch and let rise, once and for all. I mean, what’s the worst thing that could happen, right?*
No problemo, mes amis! Under my bread buddy’s tutelage (Laura, doncha know, is quite the baker herself), we got our hands, um, floury. We started with Mark Bittman’s Not-Quite-Whole-Grain-Baguettes** recipe, dutifully using the same ingredients but slightly adjusting the method. First, I opted for the stand mixer instead of the food processor (easier clean-up, in my opinion, and I like to use that pricey doorstop whenever possible!). Also, even though Bittman’s recipe didn’t require it***, my pal suggested we knead the dough a few minutes after the mixer did its thing. We didn’t handle the stickyish mixture too long—just long enough for this novice to get a sense of texture and technique. We also messed with it later when forming the boule, folding and smoothing in order to get that special roundness. Except for these small occasions of unauthorized massage, we stuck to the script and a few hours later, voila! Crunchy, crusty and—most gratifyingly—tasty bread.
Now ask me again why I waited so long?
Tartines with Toasted Manchego and Sun-dried Tomatoes
Sliced crusty bread—about 1” thick
Good quality extra-virgin olive oil
Sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil
Manchego cheese (or other aged Mediterranean cheese), sliced fairly thin
Turn broiler on. Drizzle a little oil on each bread slice, cover with a layer of sun-dried tomatoes and a layer of cheese. Place each layered slice on tin-foiled cookie sheet. Broil tartines until cheese is slightly bubbly and golden. (Ovens vary; mine takes about a minute to do this.) Watch sandwiches carefully to avoid burning. Rotate ½ way and/or tent with more tin foil if necessary. It might take some trial and error to avoid over-browning but consider eating your mistakes—they’re still probably delish!
*We could head right back to the airport and on to Paris? (As if.) 😉
**I chose the Boule Variation as you can see in the pic.
***To knead or not to knead has been a trendy question ever since Jim Lahey rolled out his no-knead bread.
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
Snow Dazed
“It can’t snow–I already put the shovels away!” I blithely told the guys at the pizzeria yesterday.
Ooops.
OK, so maybe I am part groundhog (and, come to think of it, I am from Pennsylvania!) but I really really really didn’t think winter would wallop us again. What the ducks!!! This isn’t North Dakota (or Boston)! What’s up with this gotcha glazing? Was it something I blogged???!*
Alright. Let’s look at the Top Five Reasons why it can’t possibly be snowing right now:
5. I finally changed my front door mat from Rudolph to the Easter Bunny.
4. Ducks already molting; cats already shedding. (Pass the vacuum!)
3. Daylight Savings Time starts this weekend—no snowmen ordinance in effect.
2. Tulips do not have fur coats.
1. It’s Spring Break next week—bikinis and snowdrifts don’t mix.
So, you see, I must be dreaming.** (Or this blizzard is just a figment of our weatherperson’s imagination!)*** Well, maybe I should roll with it. I’m sure if I squint real hard, all that shiny stuff out there will look just like a bright sandy beach, right?
Hey, somebody pass the sunblock!
*Sorry!
**Of a white Easter?
***Yes, you’ve entered the Twilight Zone.
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
Spring Cleaning
Birds of a feather molt together.
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
Leave It To Liebster
They like me! They really like me! Sorry for the bad Sally Field impersonation but I couldn’t help it. As a grown-up, it’s not every day you receive a gold star, or reddish/pinkish star, well, actually it’s more of a heart but…ya kn’mean. The “star” in question is the Liebster Award– an e-acknowledgment scheme that started mysteriously some time back and has circled the blogosphere as many times as it takes to walk to Pluto. (But they like me!!!) Basically it works like this: you share stuff about yourself and make a bunch of other bloggers do the same. Repeat until we run out of energy sources and/or people who can type. 🙂
Of course, none of this on-line admiration would be possible without the blogger who nominated me. Therefore, I’d like to give a big “thank you” to Louise at louslabyrinth.com for her kindness in selecting this blog. She’s a sweetie, folks, so please visit her site & give her lots of likes!
But now, without further quacking, the envelope, please.
Eleven Facts About Me (That You Probably Could Have Lived Without Knowing But Oh Well):
1. Ran for governor of California against Arnold Schwarzenegger (and many others). I lost. (Thank goodness!)*
2. Love to travel. Love to come back and plan more trips.
3. Share space with one husband, one daughter, two cats and five ducks. Spend a disproportionate time cleaning up after all of them. 😉
4. Have led a very interesting life including forays into motocross, opera, film-making, wellness and food. And, yes, that’s “interesting” in the “may you lead an interesting life” Chinese curse kind of way, too.
5. My daughter makes me a much better person than I could ever be without her. **
6. Played “Dungeons & Dragons” in college. I was the Dungeon Master. (Natch.)
7. Went to Long Beach Island (NJ) for day trips as a child. Can still taste the ketchup on the French fries.
8. Love any form of public transportation. Used to take the bus in L.A. On purpose.
9. Want to change the world, one good meal at a time. (Slogan: Mo’ Better Food 4 All.)
10. Rarely use a cell phone any more.
11. Would like to thank my husband for supporting this blog and for eating pretty much anything I make (even when he has to add barbecue sauce).
.
*This will be in my obituary, for sure. Possibly, also on my tombstone.
**Lots more work to be done, of course!
Answers to Lou’s Questions:
1. What is your favourite colour? Red. Why? Intensity, maybe?
2. Where is your favourite place in the world? This is completely cliché but c’est la vie: Paris. Why? I feel alive in the best possible ways when I’m there.
3. What is your first memory that you can remember? Trying to climb out of my crib.
4. If you had to live on one food for the rest of your life what would you choose? Easy-peasy: Chocolate. Unless climate change nixes that.
5. Do you have any pets? What are their names? Can we see a picture?
Yes, seven (!) if poultry can be pets (and why not? I have the vet bills to prove it!)
Peep, Gladys, Fannie, Puff and Bonnie
Lulu, a rescue cat from L.A.
Her brother, Frankie.
6. Has a movie ever made a massive impact on your life? There are many but Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” left indelible marks on me as a young artist. Why? It’s brilliant, terrifying and now feels all too real.
7. What are your hobbies? Reading and catnaps. Everything else is work. (But I love to work.)
8. What is your favourite holiday so far? Taking the overnight train to Rome with my daughter, staying one day in a lovely hotel at a discount Internet rate, then introducing her to all of the city’s many marvels. Gelato included. And where is your dream destination? OK, my dream destination is a bit offbeat: Godthab, Greenland. Because I always see it on that moving map they show on the TV screens when you’re crossing the Atlantic. Since I’m usually half-awake, it seems like a mythical place.
9. How would you describe your style? Independent. And who’s style do you love? Cary Grant.
10. Describe yourself in one word. Strong.
11. What is your favourite feature on yourself? Voice. Is that a feature?
My nominations for this award (in no particular order—I tried to choose peeps who didn’t appear to have been nominated before):
- http://hiddenlens.wordpress.com/
- http://wallpaper-tadka.com/
- http://whatnoduff.wordpress.com/
- http://leafandtwig.wordpress.com/
- http://sallywoodphotography.com/
- http://quietsolopursuits.wordpress.com/
- http://lifelivet.wordpress.com/
- http://lifebeam.wordpress.com/
- http://sethsnap.com/
- http://lesuperkikke.wordpress.com/
- http://twng32.wordpress.com/
[Note: Please consider this a simple acknowledgment of good work–no obligation, no pressure!]
Questions for the nominees:
1. How old were you when you got your first piece of electronics?
2. What do you want to be when you grow up?
3. If you were a country, which one would it be?
4. If you could change your first name, what would you change it to & why?
5. How many times a week do you go for a walk for fun?
6. What’s your favorite food?
7. Hot or cold?
8. Can you cook? If not, why?
9. What’s your favorite planet?
10. Have you ever dyed your hair?
11. Beach, city, mountain or desert?
Thanks again, Louise, for all your support! Good luck to everyone!
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
Just Dessert
When abominable snowmen are good.
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
Jurassic Park: Home Edition
From Tyrannosaurus foot…
…to pigeon-toed duck…
Ain’t evolution grand?*
*Sorry for the bad English, Ma. Seemed to fit.
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
A Duck for All Senses
“Can ducks smell?” my husband me asked the other night when, evidently, we ran out of dinnertime conversation.
Now, he might have said “do ducks have a sense of smell?” or “do ducks have noses?” I forget the exact verbal search string but the point got made: People* don’t know duck about birds. Alright, alright, there are folks upstate at Cornell Lab of Ornithology and a harmless species called “birder” that inhabit nature centers and the seed aisle at your local hardware store.** Except for the aforementioned ornithophiles, the modern Western human probably knows more dog science or cat characteristics than anything about most other critters.*** Maybe it’s a kind of mammalian myopia, but people do tend to take birds for granted, no matter how ubiquitous the feathery may be.
Consider, for a moment, the pigeon. Okay, maybe not. How about the sparrow, that perky park denizen–cheerful, industrious and frequently misfed? There must be something useful going on in those cute little heads that allows them to persist so abundantly in diverse ecosystems. Actually, let’s go back to the pigeon because, in point of fact, the much-maligned rock dove has long been studied for its fearless flying and amazing navigational skills. They may have bird brains but they’re brainy birds nonetheless. (They’re even good at math. “Mama, the pigeon pecked my homework!” “Do your own algebra!”)
Keeping these stellar examples of avian ability in mind, I’ve jotted down some notes on the sensory capabilities of our own ducks:
Hearing—excellent. Forget ignoring them when you want your coffee and they want their breakfast.
Taste—picky. Turn their nose up at tougher greens, preferring expensive heads of organic lettuce (when they’ve already devoured your home-grown salad bar).
Touch—deft. Can gently guide an egg across the pen into a free-form nest and delicately cover it up again. Awwwww!
Sight—okay, monocular not binocular vision but this is what slower-moving, earthbound animals need to avoid getting eaten by airborne predators.
Smell—not bad, actually. Oh, you mean, can they smell, not do they smell? Right. Have no idea. (See Tim Birkhead’s book below for further info.)
And then there is what’s probably the most important sense of all– common sense. In this key indicator of intelligence, our waterfowl really wow. To wit: They put themselves to bed at night, quack when they need something, navigate capably to food and water, distinguish friend from foe and take shelter as needed.
Hmmm, can they run for public office?
All eyes on us.
*Even people who live with five birds, apparently.
**Hey, those are my peeps!
***OK, ferret fans, hold the calls and letters. Ditto the tarantula, snake and hamster aficionados—if that’s the correct term of endearment.
Further reading:
“Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be A Bird”; Tim Birkhead; Walker & Company, NY; 2012.
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
I Spy Kitty
Purr-fect way to start the week, doncha think?
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
Checklist
1. Ducks in a row. ✓
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
Ducks Just Wanna Have Fun
Let’s start by saying this is a family-friendly blog. We eschew expletives, avoid vulgarity and generally stick to topics that, even when rather high-falutin’, should be acceptable at most dinner tables. Well, okay, we do discuss animal waste products from time to time but I hope you agree we do so in a useful manner.* And, yup, we’ve also kind of danced around the inevitable topic of canard canoodling but, heck, this is about the birds (if not the bees).
Which brings me to today’s blushing report: Puff may be a girl after all.
What the ducks?!!!** Can’t you people even figure out what end is up over there? (Or is?) Are you sure you’re fully equipped to handle poultry? I mean, how tough could it be? Well, um, pretty tough, actually.
For those of you just joining this saga (and others who have mercifully forgotten the details!), my daughter and I started this little Water(fowl) World last January by ordering five ducks over the Interwebz. Five females. (I clearly labored under the mistaken notion that our household needed five eggs a day/seven days a week/most months of the year.) Luckily (I think), we may have gotten a male or two in the mix. Lest you hasten to conclude that this is unusual, please know that our hatchery acknowledges that goofs happen—which is why you may qualify for money back if you ordered pink and got blue.
To avoid disappointment despite the discount (we gotta repaint the nursery!) (again!), folks who sell ducks attempt to pin down the correct gender by, well, pinning down ducklings, so to speak. You gotta do something tricky called (close your eyes, Sensitive Readers!) “vent sexing” which is pretty much what it sounds like. Also, some breeds have sexes with distinctive markings (a dot on their tiny bills, for example). Neither method is fully fool-proof (hence the hedging) and the complexity can only be compounded by having to deal with a bunch of squirming just-hatched baby ducks who are then sorted, boxed and shipped to hither and yon. (For example, we got our California babies when they were two-days-old. That’s 2400 air miles—and no flapping required!)
Fast-forward a coupla months. Initially we had doubts about Peep’s femininity when her (his?) young adult plumage came in. Then came the eggs. Then something I will euphemistically refer to as “horseplay”—only they not be horses and this ain’t no playground. Ducks tend to get rather amorous in the presence of water, as it turns out, and when we introduced a kiddie pool to the backyard last summer, the ducks introduced themselves to each other.
Ahem.
Anyways, long story even longer, when Puff went to the vet last month, I asked the doc if we could verify once and for all, whether or not he was a he (or maybe just a tomduck?) Back in the dog days, his/her behavior had been resolutely male—at least in the pool—but once the weather cooled down, so had his/her interest in the other ducks/drakes.
Without going into too much detail, suffice it is to say that evidently it’s very difficult to detect the apparatus that would definitively determine Puff’s masculinity. Even on an x-ray. (Squirming, again, poses an issue in bird-handling.) Apparently, when coloration or curly tail feathers won’t do it, bird people rely on behavioral clues to figure out what they’ve got, er, in hand. Here’s a chart:
Lays an egg in front of you: FEMALE.
Quacks loudly: FEMALE
Refuses to put the toilet seat down: MALE
Gets on top of another duck and bites its neck: MALE….or FEMALE (!)
What? Yes, it’s true. When Puff started to behave differently and we began to have more eggs than could easily be explained by the number of presumed ducks, it occurred to me that I may have misinterpreted said horseplay (or lost track of who did what to which). So, with great trepidation, I entered something like “unusual duck mating behavior” into a search engine and gave it a whirl.*** A quick scan of various message boards and websites revealed that, yup, girls will be girls and girl ducks will be boy ducks from time to time. It’s a hormone thang. Or a pecking order thang. Technically-speaking, that is.
Which leaves only one sure way to find out whether Puff is egg-capable or really Puff Daddy after all. That’s right: DNA testing. (Because I just haven’t spent enough money on these $5 ducks yet.) The results will be back in about a week. Meanwhile, don’t touch that browser! Stay tuned for the next exciting installment of…
“CSI: The Duck Pond”
😉
Who laid the eggs-o?
*The means justify the ends?
**Which is why this site is not called “What the Drakes!”, btw.
***Said search string now to be eternally contained in my digital permanent record card.
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
(Please) Don’t Eat the Green Snow!
‘Nuff said.
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
Safety First!
Spot your kids from earth’s orbit with newfangled phosphorescent sleds.
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
Helpful Kitty
Shows you just where to scratch.
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
Ducks in Love
Previously on Ducks of Our Lives, Peep, pretending to be a drake, breaks Gladys’ heart who then throws herself at Fannie, formerly thought to be a duck, who really secretly loves Bonnie who adores Puff who, frankly, appears to be above it all.*
Phew.
And you thought only Hollywood-types had complicated relationships…
Happy Valentine’s Day, peeps.
*From what we can tell, a true story.
Copyright 2013, Lori Fontanes
What the Ducks! 