Soaring In The Clouds

I read many romantic books about Greece when I was a student. No, not about the antient times. About modern life. To be more precise, about the places of incredible beauty. And about orthodox monasteries where the life is so as it was centuries ago when the founders come here. In those cases when the women can enter the territory of the monastery, they have to wear covering clothes, the trousers are forbidden too.

Places like this, Meteora. The name means "soaring in the clouds".

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West Wharf In Madison

The shoreline towns between New Haven and Old Lyme provide some of the most restrictive coastal access on Long Island Sound. There are a few exceptions, but most of the beaches and parks (and the roads that lead to them) are private communities. Apparently, it is illegal to walk down a public street, even in October. The corrupt and scandal-plagued Madison Police Department may turn a blind eye to prostitution and drug rings, but they still view an outsider taking pictures on the beach as a serious offense. To make a long story short, two squad cars arrived, and I got the hell out of town.

West Wharf in Madison is a small, resident only park that consists of a fishing pier, and some large rock outcroppings that provide excellent views of Falkner Island. When I visited this week, the demolition of the nearby Madison Beach Hotel attracted a small crowd to watch the destruction. With only residents of Madison in the crowd, the park was secure, and nothing could ever go wrong.

CT Coastal Access Guide: West Wharf

NY Times: Sprawling Exercise In Police Corruption

WSFB: Madison Prostitution Scandal

WTNH: Madison PD Needs Improvement

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Hamburg Cove

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Cruising Guide To The New England Coast: Hamburg Cove

Huelgoat Arboretum Walk

We have a stroll around the arboretum at Huelgoat on Tuesday October 27, meeting there at 2pm. Cost of 5� includes entrance fee. Hoping for some autumnal colour :-)

Costa Rican Cookin': Miel De Ayote

Hello again! We're back in the kitchen with another tasty recipe that's sure to get your mouth watering. Today we'll be observing my sister-in-law (and neighbor) Antonieta at work in her kitchen. If you remember my last post about chorreadas de elote, my intention was to get some more traditional recipes on here, but at the same time, to find ones that could be prepared outside of Costa Rica. I thought today's miel de ayote would be a good option, since ayote is related to squash and pumpkins. However, when I saw the procedure, I began to doubt that many of my readers would be trying this at home. In any case, I'll still give you the run-down, so you can do a bit of armchair (or deskchair) cooking:

First of all, you'll need to get an ayote or some type of pumpkin or squash. I think that ayotes are distinct from pumpkins and squash in that they're hard as hell (BYOMachete), and they have what appears to be a horrid skin disease on their outer shells:

This is the kind of thing that makes you want to turn around and walk back in the direction you came from. In any case, you gotta hack this bastard into some small chunks using a machete, an axe, or a big-ass knife.

Here's Toni showing the other reason I'm thinking this recipe may not work to well in the U.S.: tapa de dulce. This is basically a huge compressed chunk of sugar cane. Brown sugar would give you a similar taste, but it may not work the same. In any case, you have to chop and wash the tapa de dulce and add it to a pot with the ayote. That's how hard this sugar is: it fears neither water nor machete!

After accomodating the chunks of ayote (blistery side down) and dulce in the pot, you'll want to put it over your wood fired stove.

Mwa ha haaaa! Wait, you don't have a wood-fired stove? Oh crap. Well, this may also work on a regular stove, but I don't quite know how to do it.

Once on the stove, add about a half-cup of water. This may seem like precious little water, but somehow once the sugar melts and bubbles, it'll do just fine.

Partially cover, and wait about an hour or so.

Watch, observe, and wait by the fire, listening to the rain on the roof.

After about an hour, check on the pot. It should look like boiling Gremlins.

You can use a spoon to spread some of the syrup (miel) all over the ayote. That'll help it absorb the flavor.

Depending on what you've got, you can serve the ayote either hot or cold. If you've got a really thin-shelled ayote, you can theoretically eat the shell, but generally it's best scooped out and served without the shell. It's good with a bit of milk, cream, or ice cream.

Delicioso!

In any case, I hope you liked this, and if anyone is brave enough to try this at home (or over a campfire somewhere), I'd love to hear from you!

Buen provecho!

Sawyer's Lobsters

In a residential neighborhood, along Birch Plain Creek, on Jupiter Point in Groton, sits Sawyer's Lobster Dock. This is not a public dock, however lobsters can be purchased from the tanks housed inside the building here. It has been a terrible decade for the lobster industry on Long Island Sound, but the past two years have shown some signs of improvement.

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The Big Sheep

It was about this time last year that I reported on the Big Sheep at Halloween and I have mentioned the Big Sheep in another previous post when we have come down just to use the Ewetopia soft play area of an evening, but we have just spent our first full day at the Big Sheep for a long time and there have been a few changes.

My advice to potential first time visitors at The Big Sheep is to arrive by 10.30 and make sure you see the shows. None of them are more than about 20 mins, and all are quite entertaining, with one exeption. Don't bother with the Beer Show. They lure you in with the promise of free beer, and in actual fact you get nothing in the show and can get free beer just by visiting the brewery whether you have been to the show or not. It's little samples of the beer they make, which is quite nice and you can have as many as you want! Of the other shows, my children like the sheep show, and in particular, feeding the sheep at the end, and the duck show. My husband made the mistake of giving my youngest daughter the camera and now we have nearly two hundred photos of Indian Running ducks being chased round a field by a sheepdog.

There are lots of new outdoor things to do, most of which is free. We liked the jumping pillows (think bouncy castle without the walls) and the little peddlecarts. The chair-o-plane you can go on as many times as your stomach allows, but its only open at certain times. Things you have to pay for include pony rides and a combat area. We didn't do either of these but running round shooting people with laser guns looked fun.

We played in Ewetopia for a while, stayed for the sheep race, then came home. I would have loved to show you a photo of the sheep, racing down from the fields to the finish line with thier knitted riders on thier back, but my camera battery had died by then. We placed bets, but none of us won.