Month: July 2016

Here’s Faith again, showing off her impish side now that she’s turned 6.

Turkey vultures are among the homelist of avian species; I suppose the California Condor is uglier but I have never seen a California Condor in the wild (or anywhere for that matter.)  I took this photograph of a turkey vulture on one of our daily outings in Costa Rica this past January.  At the time, I had  photographs of many more appealing birds to post here but was reminded of this shot because I’ve been seeing lots of turkey vultures around here lately.

 

Faith, my personal trainer’s daughter, just turned six.  I have taken photos of Faith since she was six months old and it has been a joy to watch her develop into a confident and sassy little girl who is both athletic and artistic.  Faith started taking piano lessons last year and this year’s birthday present from Grandma was her very own piano.

My tomato garden has not been thriving. I think the stretch of 105°+ temperatures that we had a week or so ago took its toll.  I have four tomato plants: two heirloom tomatoes; an old standby, Early Girl; and a cherry tomato variety new to me.  Neither heirloom has set any tomatoes and the Early Girl was the earliest plant to set tomatoes this year but they’re all still green.  The strange, unknown cherry tomato which seems to be a dwarf plant at only about 12 inches after 6 weeks, and scrawny besides,  has come through for me.  I walked out to check on the Early Girls and a tiny splash of red caught my eye on the other plant.  A single ripe tomato, about the size of a shooter marble, hanging at the very bottom of the main stem, caught a glint of sunlight through the lath.  Its presence had eluded me on previous crop examinations.  There are a couple more tomatoes on this plant.  Glory be!

I used my macro lens set a couple of inches away from the tomato and set to f/51 for as deep a depth of field as I could get.  I couldn’t get the camera in front of the red tomato because of the lath.  I used macro to emphasize the importance of this first ripe tomato in my garden.

My mother, who died last year five days shy of her 98th birthday, was a talented woman.  It seemed to me as if she could do anything.  She was Martha Stewart before Martha.  She was a talented seamstress and tailor and she made designer clothes  for me well into my adulthood.   Her incredible Halloween costume creations like the red Leslie Salt container that encased me one year and the following year’s sack of Idaho potatoes, won raves at the Halloween parades.  Her design and orchestration of the brick patio in our backyard with my brother and one of his friends as her hod carriers was masterful and belonged in House Beautiful.  She was a weaver, a gourmet cook, a gardener with a green thumb, I could go on.

But one of my earliest recollections about her feats of creativity came one day when I was about 5 years and was outside playing with several of the neighborhood kids.  It was lunch time and Mom told all the kids she’d make them tuna sandwiches.  I don’t recall how many kids there were, probably just three or four.   We all tromped inside and gathered in the small kitchen watching as Mom found cans of tuna and a loaf of Wonder Bread—she didn’t take up baking her own bread until the ’60’s.  But, when she reached in the fridge for the mayonnaise, the jar was almost empty.  There was no time to run to the grocery store, what with several hungry kids waiting  for lunch, so Mom, rather effortlessly, made mayonnaise from scratch! Mayonnaise is one of those things that as a kid, you never consider that it has an origin anywhere but in a jar with a Best Foods (or Hellman’s on the East Coast) label on the outside that comes from the grocery store.  All the other kids had the same notion.  We watched in awe as Mom got her Waring Blender out, dropped in a couple of egg yolks and some lemon juice, added oil and suddenly, there was a blender full of mayonnaise.  Our mouths were agape.  I knew my Mom could do a lot of things, but this, creating mayonnaise from scratch, was magic.

I thought of Mom, magically creating mayonnaise, when I made my first batch of mayonnaise from scratch the other day.  The PaleoRestart program I’ve been following for a couple of weeks sets milestones and one of my milestones this week was to make mayonnaise from scratch.  The Paleo Leap people, those behind PaleoRestart, like to use ingredients that are natural without additives and preservatives and especially nothing that contains soy, an ingredient that is often genetically modified and contains questionable chemicals.The first listed ingredient of Best Foods mayonnaise is soybean oil.    I haven’t become a complete convert to Paleo restrictions yet (I question how some foods are considered “paleo” and others aren’t, and I still wonder when the cavemen started making bacon, and now I’m wondering which came first, Best Foods or caveman mayo ), but I thought I’d try my hand at recreating Mom’s magical mayonnaise.  Then, once made (it took less than 15 minutes from start to finish, including clean up) I decided to continue my SB5000 off camera flash practice.  I set the French canning jar filled with freshly made mayonnaise on my black kitchen table with the flash just to the right of the jar, trying various settings.  This was my favorite result.

Lens (mm): 48; ISO: 100; Aperture: f/16; Shutter: 1/8; Exp. Comp.: -0.7; Flash Comp.: 0.0

Happy Fourth of July!!

You never know what you’ll find on a visit to the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero in San Francisco.  Ferry schedules are still posted there but the main corridor of the building has restaurants, souvenir shops, food vendors, and one stand called “Farm Fresh to You” featuring Organic HAIRloom Tomatoes.  That made me laugh so I had to share it on my blog.  The auto spell check kept changing it to “heirloom” so I fought until it kept my original spelling.  This might be something to add to Lynne Truss’s work, Eats Shoots And Leaves, perhaps in the section where she discusses, quite passionately, the Green Grocer’s Apostrophe, what with these hairloom tomatoes being offered by a greengrocer and all. The only thing better would have been if they had spelled tomatoes “tomato’s.”

And, in case you’re wondering what the Ferry Building looks like now, here’s a shot with the “hairloom” tomatoes in the lower left corner.

As I walked back toward the elevator at the San Francisco Hyatt Regency to get my luggage after checking out, I passed the Concierge Desk and did a double take.  The sides were decorated with hundreds of old bells,  the kind that used to set on desks and counters that one punched with the palm of the hand to summon…well…to summon a bellhop. There were hundreds of old bells attached vertically and lit with under counter lights.   The concierge told me many of them still made sounds although those I punched didn’t respond.  He said the hotel had just remodeled the Concierge Desk, adding the bells  a couple of months ago.  I knelt down and took quite a few close up shots but when I looked at them, I didn’t like the composition because the bells looked as if they were falling off the wall.  I rotated and cropped this shot and now the bells look anchored again, ready to summon …well to summon a bellhop.

I’m in San Francisco visiting with my friend Melinda who is here from Arizona for a couple of days with her husband.  We spent the day meandering along the Embarcadero enjoying the cooler temperatures and the sights, sounds, and smells of the waterfront.  When we walked into the Pier 1 building,  we were captivated by the reflections down the curving hallway leading out to the pier. A guy in a red shirt walked through, leaving his image reflected on all of the shiny surfaces.  The Bay Bridge and a sailboat provide the backdrop as the man in the red shirt exits the building, taking his reflections with him.