Clear skies and a 75F high. Warm in the sun, but cool in the shade. Humid and slightly steamy. Fall is slightly late out of the gate.
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Daily Catskills: 10/04/17
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Tag Archives: Catskills Photography
Daily Catskills: 10/03/17
A clear, frosty morning, rising to a high of 67F. Initial muted dashes of red amidst the yellowing. Fall has yet to show its true colors.
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Daily Catskills: 10/02/17
After an overnight frost dissolving into a misty morning, 70F by mid-afternoon and sunny.
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Daily Catskills: 10/01/17
After a foggy start, 60F by mid-afternoon and warm in the sun.
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Saving Seeds: Sunflowers
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Sunflowers are astonishingly beautiful and uplifting, towering over the farm like sentry guards radiating happiness, accumulating and distributing sunshine. They’re also packed with thousands of highly nutritious, edible seeds. Once they start to droop towards the ground, you may have to compete with the birds, chipmunks, and squirrels, who climb up them in search of the seeds and break the stems. When the blooms are resting on the ground, like they’re on some floral time-out, they seeds are fair game. You can either wrap the live heads in paper to stop animals from eating them, or you can cut the heads off completely even before they’re ready to harvest.
The seed is the white pellet underneath the yellow face of the bloom (pictured above). They develop a black strip as the flower dies, eventually turning a dusky, dark grey/black (pictured below). They are even delicious like this without any cooking, and packed full of raw nutrients like iron, calcium, vitamin B-6 and high in potassium and magnesium. Continue reading
Daily Catskills: 09/30/17
Dark, gloomy with hovering fog. A plunge into the chilly mid-fifties. Got wood?
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Daily Catskills: 09/28/17
58F by 6.30am, balmy with clear skies and sunrise ushering in dappled cloud. 65F by mid-afternoon.
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Daily Catskills: 09/26/17
A high of 85F with morning fog disappearing into the mountains. Sunny with scant cloud. The sunflowers express how we feel about summer ending.
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Daily Catskills: 09/24/17
A high of 84F with clear skies of hazy blue. Sunday scorcher.
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Heritage Apple Cake
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If you need something to do with all the heritage apples that are falling all over the Catskills now, here’s a recipe passed on to me by Tamara Ehlin of the Forsyth BnB in Kingston. This recipe is gorgeous because a sugary, chewy crust forms on the top of the cake and gradually softens all the way down to its fruity bottom.This cake is as wild as our apples.
However you add the fruit, it still ends up at the base of the cake. I didn’t put enough apples in the little loaf pictured above because whenever you do this recipe it will feel like you’re putting too much fruit in. The batter barely covers the apples and you have to press the mixture down before you put it in the oven. I made a larger cake by doubling the ingredients and it came out perfectly with all the fruit sunk to the bottom.
This recipe is good for soft and stone fruit too.
Fruit Cake
1 cup AP flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
4 oz butter (1 stick)
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 tsp almond extract
2 eggs
2 cups sliced fruit (a mix of tart and sweet works best, like sour cherries, plums, peaches, blueberries, or peeled apple)
Soften the butter and whip it together with the sugar, vanilla, almond extract. Add the two eggs and beat them in. Mix the whole mixture well. Sift the flour and baking powder and add it into the butter/sugar mix gradually. Mix until you have a batter. The batter will be very stiff. Once you have a smooth batter, stir in the apples and mix well. Add to a greased loaf tin and bake on 350 for about 40 minutes. (Note that cooking time could be longer or shorter depending on the depth or shape of the pan. If the pan is a flatter cake pan, cooking time will be less.)
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Daily Catskills: 09/21/17
An 80F high, humid and bright despite hazy clouds, with a faint breeze.
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Daily Catskills: 09/20/17
A high of 80F, humid and overcast with late afternoon sun emerging. Summer’s rolling to a steamy end.
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Daily Catskills: 09/19/17
Hot in the sun with hazy sunshine, with a cool breeze ushering the fall and a high of 82F. These last few days of summer end on Thursday. Fall begins on Friday with the Autumnal Equinox.
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Daily Catskills: 09/16/17
A balmy morning at 65F by 9am. The morning fog rolled away to reveal trees, bushes, forest floor and fields liberally bestrewn with lacy spiders’ webs, as if the forest had been dressed for halloween overnight.
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Daily Catskills: 09/12/17
79F by mid-afternoon and sunny with hazy cloud. Cool in the shade. Splashes of red dot the landscape.
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Daily Catskills: 09/10/17
A high of 65F, alternating sunshine and cloud, all swept through by a strong breeze.
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Daily Catskills: 09/09/17
Cloudy, overcast and soggy after overnight rain with a high of 57F and some late afternoon sun. Squash blossoms.
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Daily Catskills: 09/03/17
Rainy and 61F by mid-afternoon with swirling mist and more rain.
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Catskills Links: Labor Day Edition
Tonight
Burlesque is back in the Catskills. Tonight at Union Grove Distillery beginning at 8.30pm. Buy tickets here, or they are available on the door. Seating is first come, first served. Just Shop Boutique, across the road, is open until 8pm.
Saturday 2nd
John Burroughs Woodchuck Lodge hosts its penultimate Wild Saturday at 1pm at Woodchuck Lodge in Roxbury entitled Face to Face with Raptors, in which Annie Mardiney, federally licensed wildlife “rehabilitator”, shares her deep passion by bringing hawks, owls, and falcons to show visitors.
Family Day at the Catskill Interpretive Center: bird watching, hiking, crafts, rock painting, learning to identify animal footprints and more from the natural world.
Logic and Structure at the Painters Gallery in Fleischmanns, a group show featuring Beth Caspar, Susan Spencer Crowe, Joan Grubin, Robert James, Wanda Kossak, Don Muchow, Margaret Neill, Paula Quinon.
Saturday night sees the annual lighting of the fire towers at 9am. Find out where the best places to view them are. The Catskills Fire Tower system celebrated 100 years of watching for wild fires over the Catskills this summer.
Sunday 3rd
Sunday is Bovina Farm Day, featuring farm animals, a corn maze, the scarecrow contest and vendors selling and sampling locally produced products.
Apple pie contest is between 2-3pm. $6 per car and a full day of family fun!
Next week:
From September 6th to 12th: Watershed Stories from the Catskill Center, . Led by Lisa Jacobson, these workshops were designed to provide a unique holistic, visual and written product based on “Art as an EcoSystem”. To do this, participants recycled beautiful old books into a retelling of water, the New York Watershed and its interconnections with everything else.
September 7th: Catskill Cuisine with Chef Rob Handel at the Catskill Interpretive Center in Mount Tremper.
And…
A new bus service to bring people to the Catskills.
Daily Catskills: 08/29/17
A chilly morning, with a high of 59F and overcast with afternoon rain. Summer’s got the blues.
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Daily Catskills: 08/28/17
A high of 72F and overcast with periods of sunshine. Crisp overnight lows and chilly mornings.
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Daily Catskills: 08/26/17
Another high in the low 70s, warm and sunny. Monarchs munch the milkweed.
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Daily Catskills: 08/18/17
Surprise! More heavy rain. A high of 80F, with oppressive humidity, a heavy blanket of cloud and mist swirling over the mountains like the ghost of summers past. Steamy.
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Daily Catskills: 08/16/17
A chilly, but humid morning at 66F, with mist and clouds dueling under the rising sun.
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Daily Catskills: 08/15/17
After heavy overnight rain, a chilly morning with foggy cloud settled over the landscape like a blanket. A hazy, humid day with a high of 75F.
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Daily Catskills: 08/13/17
An 84F high and sunny despite those ubiquitous clouds and their ever eccentric formations.
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Daily Catskills: 08/11/17
79F, dark, humid and smothered with rippled, blue milk glass clouds. If today’s weather were a movie, it would be a moody film noir: sultry and begging for a wet ending. Update: it got its wet ending: a thorough rain shower mid-evening.
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Daily Catskills: 08/08/17
Mostly sunny and bright despite with an armada of voluminous clouds. 74F by mid-afternoon. The rain takes a holiday.
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Daily Catskills: 08/07/17
An unexpectedly chilly morning and a rainy afternoon. A 64F high. Migliorelli’s farm stand also sells perfect rainy day Italian desserts like chocolate pudding and crème brûlée for days like this.
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Daily Catskills: 08/06/17
74F by mid-afternoon and cloudy with a cool breeze. Periods of sunshine ripen the hazelnuts.
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Daily Catskills: 08/05/17
74F by the afternoon, billowing clouds revealing occasional sunshine. Refreshing breeze in the trees punctuated by the annoying buzz of a neighbor’s drone in the distance. Garlic curing in a shady spot.
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Daily Catskills: 08/02/17
Early morning mist rolls out to reveal laden clouds. All-day thunder leads to torrential afternoon rain. 72F by 1.30pm.
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Daily Catskills: 08/01/17
87F by mid-afternoon and sunny. A scorcher despite billowing clouds and sprinkles of rain.
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Daily Catskills: 07/29/17
72F and sunny with a cool breeze.
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Daily Catskills: 7/28/17
Morning sun! Misty clouds wafting over head with a warm, gentle breeze and birdsong. Summer’s back for a while, with today’s high almost 80F.
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Daily Catskills: 07/27/17
72F by mid-afternoon with rain for most of the day, only stopping about 3pm. Toad weather.
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Daily Catskills: 07/26/17
Chilly and overcast, warming up at lunchtime, for a high of 71F. Dramatic clouds with brief sunshine.
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Daily Catskills: 07/24/17
A high of 62F after a misty morning. Gloomy, chilly afternoon with rain showers except for a brief, sunny interlude at lunchtime.
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Daily Catskills: 07/23/17
Warm and humid all day until some brief, but heavy, late afternoon rains leave us with 78F by 5.30pm. An onion blooms.
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Daily Catskills: 07/22/17
82F by 1pm, humid and overcast.
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Everyday Philosophy
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I walked down a mountain today to the Gilding Bee at The Painters Gallery in Fleischmanns, run by Laura Sue King.
If you don’t understand the arts, like contemporary art for example, or you can’t see a use for it, The Gilding Bee couldn’t be of more help to guide you and it runs for another week. The object of this project, funded by a grant administered by the Roxbury Arts Group, was to gild small, familiar items (that fit in the palm of your hand) to be included in an exhibition on July 30th in the gallery.
Coating every day objects in gold leaf elevates the ordinary but necessary into something exceptional, reaffirming the value of every day items, and why not? The whole project highlights the importance of art, friendship, community, and other things that seem trivial, or taken for granted, as we rush from place to place. It’s a small, symbolic way to celebrate the good in a world of bad. I bought dice, a bottle, pieces of old Prague pavement that had come loose, and a lipstick.
Lipstick: The lipstick effect is an economic theory holding that during difficult economic times women spend more money on goods like lipstick because it’s a cheap way of making yourself feel good. According to The Economist: “Believers in the lipstick theory trace the phenomenon back to the Depression, when cosmetic sales increased by 25%, despite the convulsing economy”. Something you might think is irrelevant, like lipstick, has had its own economic theory for almost 100 years.
Pieces of Prague Pavement: we went on vacation to Europe seven years ago and, as we wandered the streets of Prague, inebriated on Czech lager, we took a real, concrete souvenir: part of the city. Adding some gold to these two innocuous, square cobblestones took me back in time. I remembered the stews, the borscht, the bridge, and the stunning beauty of Prague. We’re told that material things are burdensome and we shouldn’t get attached to them, but as you get older, even small objects retain memories for you that the brain has long forgotten.
The gold dice represent people who think they got rich simply by working hard and being smart, when success takes a lot of luck, like being born into a wealthy family.
The Gilding Bee runs for another week: next Monday, Wednesday and Thursday from 1pm to 5pm at The Painters Gallery, Main Street, Fleischmanns, NY 12430. Suggested donation of $5.
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Daily Catskills: 07/20/17
85F by mid-afternoon, sweaty and humid with a mix of sun and cloud. Late afternoon showers.
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Daily Catskills: 07/19/17
85F by mid-afternoon, warm in the sun, pleasant in the shade.
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Daily Catskills: 07/18/17
After a moody morning: 84F by mid-afternoon, sunny, warm with distant clouds. Blueberries ripening.
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Daily Catskills: 07/17/17
84F by mid-afternoon with the morning sun disappearing under thick clouds, and a dash of late afternoon thunder. Humid.
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Daily Catskills: 07/16/17
83F by mid-afternoon, sunny with distant, fluffy clouds.
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Daily Catskills: 06/30/17
84F by mid-afternoon and humid with refreshing afternoon rain.
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Daily Catskills: 06/28/17
55F at 8am, sunny, wet from overnight rain, rising to 70F by mid-afternoon with a flotilla of chubby clouds.
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Daily Catskills: 06/27/17
After a wet, gloomy morning, 67F by mid-afternoon and mostly sunny. Huge, thundering clouds quickly rolling through stealing the scene, cracking lightning and later issuing some torrential, late afternoon rain. Moody.
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Daily Catskills: 06/14/17
80F by mid-afternoon, fresh and sunny.
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Daily Catskills: 06/12/17
89F by mid-afternoon, sun blazing with hazy cloud moving in around dusk.
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Daily Catskills: 06/11/17
88F by mid-afternoon, hot and sunny with a cool breeze in the shade. Looks a like this will be a good year for apples.
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Daily Catskills: 06/09/17
74F by mid-afternoon, mostly sunny with some cloud and a persistent, cool breeze.
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Daily Catskills: 06/06/17
56F by mid-afternoon, overcast, with heavy rain clearing up late afternoon. Still chilly, but perfect for mushrooms and ducks.
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Daily Catskills: 06/05/17
70F by mid-afternoon, humid and breezy, clouds ready to burst all day, mist crawling over mountains. Sultry.
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