Fall Colors tour

For the last couple of weeks there have been signs at Kennekuk inviting one to buy tickets for some Halloween festival that is today.  Rather than get stuck in the crowds for this event and have some flunky demand that I pay to park near the Lake Mingo trail, I decided that I should try hiking somewhere else today.  With a little advice from birder2 I decided to head over to Forest Glen preserve.  I've been there a number of times with her, but not for a long time and never on my own.  After a little confusion on the route, I found the place, and started walking on the Old Barn trail.  Of course when I got there I realized that I'd forgotten to bring anything to eat, which I figured was going to limit my energy.  I decided to walk around the whole loop of that trail and then move my car rather than just keep walking up the creek when the identity of the trail changed.  I moved the car, stopped to pee, and went on the Willow Creek and Primitive Loop trails.  By this time it was a bit after one and I was feeling rather peckish, so I let that and the fact that I have a zillion things I need to do around the house convince me to come back home.  I guess I covered about 5 miles.

With the weather being so dry, I expected the fall colors to be early and poor, but they're pretty much peaking right now and they're glorious.  Forest Glen was wonderful, as were the places with trees that I drove by on the way there, and Homer Lake too, where I stopped briefly on the way home from work yesterday.  Now, I just have to convince myself to actually do the stuff in the house rather than going out again.

Adventures in Cooking

Wednesday when I was doing my weekly shopping, I decided that I should try broadening my cooking horizons a bit, and I bought a vegetable I've never tried to cook with before: orange cauliflower.  Actually, I've never cooked with cauliflower at all.  But improving my diet is part of my quest to improve my health in general, cauliflower is supposed to be good for you, I suspect the orange kind gets its orange from carotene which ought to mean it's even better, and I'm pretty OK with cauliflower when other people cook it for me.  So I bought this strange object.

Fast forward to yesterday when I discovered a couple of bananas that had slipped from sight in the banana box on the top of the fridge.  They were just a tiny bit overripe, but more to the point, I'd bought enough bananas for my standard one banana a day without them.  So I had surplus bananas.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, and my necessity was to do something with the cauliflower and to avoid having to throw away excess bananas.  So I started by opening up the head of cauliflower, getting rid of the leafy bits and the parts of the stems that tended to green, broke it up into bite-sized bits, and put it in the skillet while I cut up a rib of celery, which I added to the pan along with some chopped onion and garlic, and started dicing some chicken breast tenders.  I added the chicken and curry spices to the pan.  The cauliflower seemed to need a fair bit of cooking, so I waited a little bit before I started the instant brown rice.  When the brown rice was at the halfway point (where the directions say remove from heat, fluff, and let stand for 5 minutes) I added the bananas, sliced, and a can of cream of chicken soup.  When the rice was done, I mixed it all together in the stir-fry pan, put two lunch portions and a little extra into leftover containers, and tucked into the rest.

It was pretty good, though the cream of chicken kind of overpowers the cauliflower.  Perhaps next time, I will trust the cauliflower enough to make something similar without adding the soup.  (I'm thinking using an apple instead of the bananas, though.  Banana curry is good now and then, but I do have a banana for breakfast every day, which is generally enough bananas.)

Argh

My Canon i960 photo printer seems to be toast again.  Assuming I can find the time, I now need to either get it fixed again or replace it; I'm leaning to replacing it.

Anyone with actual experience with current model 6 color or better printers (or really any technology that you're willing to tell me would make prints good enough to put in an art show) please share your wisdom.