Category: photos

basket (friday foto finder)

This was one of the first photos I took when I arrived in Macau, an excursion I made on the last day of my trip to Hong Kong in August, 2011. These large baskets were stacked near the sidewalk under a pedestrian ramp. I’m not sure what they were for.

I do wonder if they belong to some sort of produce vendor, as they look similar to the baskets in the photo below, which were in use at a Hong Kong street market.

This week’s friday foto finder theme is “basket,” which led to me rummaging through my virtual basket of photos. This time, after much rummaging, I did end up going with the first photo that came to mind.

To see what other baskets others have shared, and to find out how to participate (it’s easy!), check out the friday foto finder blog.

Happy Turkey Day

Here are some happy turkeys.

Here in New England, it is not uncommon to come across roving flocks of wild turkeys. I came across these guys a couple years ago while heading to a nearby farm to buy some eggs. (Chicken eggs, mind you.) They were in the long winding driveway, and as I drove up, they just kept running ahead, seemingly reluctant to spend the extra energy to get over the towering snowbanks. (That was the winter of Too Much Winter.) All the way at the top of the hill, they figured I was in it for the long chase, and took flight.

vegetables of character

And now for something completely different. Well, not completely. It’s still produce. But kinda sorta different.

It’s not tomatoes.¹


I think this guy looks a bit like a cross between The Shmoo and Lou Costello. That is, If their union somehow resulted in a squash offspring. (This photo was from February of this year.)

I chose this photo to post in a hurry tonight, and it reminded me of the bizarre looking eggplant character I’d shared a while back. Upon digging up that post to link to it, I find that it was a year ago today that I shared that eggplant. And so, a tradition is born. From this day forward, I declare November 21st to be International Day of the Odd Vegetable.²

—

¹ I have one last tomato post stewing, but don’t have time to wait for it to finish cooking. I have too much other produce to deal with for Thanksgivng.
² This name could use Some Work. Any recommendations? (Day of Peculiar Produce?)

a dozen tomatoeufs

Back in the summer of 2007, I participated in a CSA, and found myself frequently overwhelmed by produce. Case in point: for several weeks in a row, I received 10 pounds of tomatoes a week. For people who do things like make pasta sauce and can it, this sort of bounty probably sounds wonderful. For me, who did neither, it was about 9 pounds of tomatoes too many per week.

I made it through, with many tomatoes shared with friends, many caprese salads, and probably a certain amount of compost.¹

I also had fun taking photos of the tomatoes. One week I had a large number of little egg-sized tomatoes, which inspired me to play with my food. (The yolk is a little round yellow tomato.)

¹ I also produced a fair amount of tomato posts, including a tomato ThThTh list, and a post about excessive tomatoes, in which I actually first posted these photos.²
² It’s so funny to go back and look at some of my old posts. I was a posting maniac back when this blog was in its infancy. Also, I was often pretty damn funny. If I do say so myself.³
³ Apparently, I do.

the great tomato debate

In the US, we are frequently subjected to the debate over the tomato’s status: Is it a fruit or a vegetable?

The answer, of course, is “yes.”

Because the real question is whether you are asking the question from a botanical or a culinary standpoint.

Botanically, it is unquestionably a fruit:

In botany, a fruit is a part of a flowering plant that derives from specific tissues of the flower, one or more ovaries, and in some cases accessory tissues.

But so is a bell pepper. Or zucchini. Or a butternut squash. But because these things are regularly cooked or included in savory dishes, they are considered vegetables. Culinarily, at least in the US and many European countries, tomatoes are treated as vegetables. You find them cooked into sauces and stews, roasted with garlic, or you might eat them raw, chopped up with herbs and olive oil on bruschetta. They go in the salad with lettuce and onion, not the salad with strawberries and melon.

However, in other parts of the world, the tomato’s status as a fruit is more widely accepted. I remember an occasion where we had a bit of a semester-end party on the last day of a particularly intensive class. People signed up to bring things. A guy from Korea signed up to bring some fruit, and he brought a little box of grape tomatoes, and it led to an interesting discussion.

I remembered this when we were served this dessert at the conference banquet¹ in Shanghai back in May:

The fruit salad consisted of chunks of melon, and grape tomatoes. Aside from my interest in the appearance of tomatoes in a fruit salad, it was a thoroughly disappointing dessert. Which, I suppose, was fitting.³

So, do you want to weigh in the debate?⁴

—

¹ Sadly, as is often the case with large-scale meals, the quality of the food was pretty mediocre. Pretty much everything I tried was bland.²

² Of course, my options were somewhat limited by my largely vegetarian diet constraints. So I didn’t partake, for example, of this soup. I did, however, appreciate that I was able to easily identify this as chicken soup. Other items that were served to us without explanation were more mysterious.

³ Did I mention the food was mediocre? The food was mediocre.

⁴ And if so, do you want to weigh in using pounds or kilograms?

wood (friday foto finder)

This week’s friday foto finder¹ theme is “wood.” Having just posted some photos of a door, and given the theme of wood, my brain connected the two by remembering the remarkable woodwork, on the doors and elsewhere in the building, in the Casa Battló in Barcelona, Spain. This remarkable house was designed by Gaudí, and contains very few straight lines. My camera and I visited it (along with other members of my family) in September, 2009. (I even posted another photo of it way back when.)


A detail from one of the doors.


A beautifully carved wooden door.


A slightly more utilitarian-looking door, but still strikingly curvy and carvy.


Another carved wood detail of…something. Possibly a door. Maybe just a wall. But it’s pretty.


Another detail from something. Might be a doorway. I love the undulating border.

¹ Yes, I realize it is still Thursday, but I have my reasons.

one door, three seasons

There is a door at BU, on the street where I park, that often catches my eye. It’s a door on an otherwise traditional-looking Brownstone building, and its bright blue contrasts strikingly with the muted red-browns of the brick and stone. I happened to park directly in front of it yesterday, and it was featured among my rainy-window-filtered views. In editing my photos last night, I was reminded that I had photographed this door, and its companion red standpipe and vintage-looking fire alarm bell, a number times in the past. I knew that I had some photos of the door in question in the snow, and when I poked back through my photo library found I had one with it posing with a flower spring shrub. (It’s entirely possible that I have more photos of this door from other times, but I didn’t necessarily tag them for easy retrieval.)


Blue door, November 2012


Blue door, February 2011


Blue door, May, 2011

Finding this set gives me the urge to photograph some same subject many more times, but under different conditions.

water colors

These are all photos from today, from both ends of my commute home. (Well, the sunset ones were from a stop on my way home. It was dark by the time I actually got home. Come to think of it, it was a really long commute home. I left Boston at 3:00, picked up Theo at his school just after 4, then had to collect Phoebe at her school at 4:45. We hung out for a bit at the school, and it was 5:30 by the time we got home.)

In case you couldn’t tell, it was rainy today.

Goldsworthy pilgrimage

Yesterday was a gorgeous fall day, sunny and surprisingly warm. We found ourselves with no specific plans for the day, and the kids were starting to go a little stir-crazy in the grandparents’ house. Inspired by the previous day’s leafy homage to Goldsworthy, I felt compelled to visit the large sculpture garden nearby to see one of Goldsworthy’s own works.

I posted a couple of photos I’d taken there last month, at which point I realized it had been 6 full years since we’d been there. It had been when six-year-old Phoebe was under a year old, and if you do the math, you will realize that four-year-old Theo had never been there at all. Clearly, this needed to be remedied.

The Storm King Art Center now boasts 2 large Goldsworthy works. I had seen the first wall before, but hadn’t realized that a second wall had been built only a couple of years ago.


The wall winds through the trees.


It wriggles all the way down the hill, where it dips into a pond.


This is the second wall. I don’t believe that the twig ring is part of the sculpture, as it is not in the description. However, even if not put there by Goldsworthy himself, it was a fitting tribute.

I found myself wondering why it had taken us so long to get back here, especially given how much both Phoebe and Theo love art. But our trips are often too short, often well under 48 hours, and are usually filled with other family-related things.

(Once again, these photos were just taken with my iPhone, as I didn’t remember to pack my camera for this trip.)