Bouquets Garni

My mother is a daring woman. Despite the fact that she had a medical procedure on Friday, and her discharge instructions clearly stated that she was to engage in strenuous activities such as fashioning bouquets garni under no circumstances, she brazenly tossed caution to the wind and constructed the herb collection you see to the left. We figured it was OK, given that it's not so much a bouquet garni as a teabag filled with herbs.

She assembled the aforementioned herbs in the service of a delicious Pumpkin Stuffed with Vegetable Stew, found in this month's issue of Gourmet. And yes, the pumpkin pictured met its maker shortly after this picture was taken (I never said this wasn't a snuff blog). We recommend this stew highly, particularly if you have 7 hours hanging heavy on your hands, and a bunch of leftover celeriac and fennel bulbs laying around for which you have no other use.

The cat pictured to the right didn't help at all, and spent much of the weekend monopolizing the spot on top of the cable box.

Monument Mountain & Lion's Head

Given that it's late October, it seemed wise to squeeze a few hikes into this sunny, 70-degree New England Sunday. Feeling autumnal and still impressed with all of the history surrounding us, we headed to Monument Mountain in the Massachusetts Berkshires, for a mellow hike. We wanted to picnic where Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Oliver Wendell Holmes had 150 years earlier. And so we did. With all of the whining kids, unleashed dogs, and people on cell phones Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York could put forward. Even in the somewhat view-compromised picnic spot we had chosen for its lack of appeal to the madding crowd, a woman stood not 3 feet behind us and startled us with her long and sonorous nose blowing. Someone even saw my awesome vintage reproduction 1985 White Sox cap and mistook me for a Boston Red Sox fan. Go Cleveland!

We headed south to our adopted home state Connecticut, and once again, she rewarded us richly. We climbed Lion's Head peak, which folks believe is the loveliest part of the Appalachian Trail in Connecticut. What dogs there were were leashed, and the few well-behaved children we saw listened attentively as their parents explained how the Taconic range was formed and the roles of chlorphyll, carotenoids, and anthocyanins in the life cycle of the leaf. Ahh, the Nutmeg State.

Here's the view from Lion's Head peak with me looking extremely cool:
And Johnny S directing your attention to those lovely reds below:
I always like just walking through the woods at this time of year.

Mercy Meadows

Just a little note to draw the attention of the millions of readers of False Reckonings to Mercy Meadows, the highly fabulous band of Dwayne, the boyfriend of my friend Maura (wow, with this finely crafted sentence, I have turned my back for good on my editing career). We saw them Friday night just down the street. They play tuneful old country songs to which to tap your toe, and their singer Laura Lee has a June Carter-Cash-ish sound. This is a photo not taken by me from their MySpace page:
Dwayne, who plays bass, is there in the back in the black and white shirt. Yeah Dwayne!

Halloween Come Early

Despite some admittedly excellent college football amusements this weekend, by this afternoon I was tired of lounging around the house whining about my runny nose. We set out for a hike along some pretty spectacular granite ridges*, marshes, and forest in the West Woods. We stopped for lunch within view of the Great Hemlock, a massive tree that had been over 200 years old when it died in the 1990s. Apparently, a 1985 hurricane carried the dastardly woolly adelgid (an aphidlike bug that kills hemlocks by greedily eating all their sap) across the sound from Long Island, and in short order many of the hemlocks in Connecticut suffered the same fate as their leader. It made for an altogether spooky effect as we chomped on our ham and cheese. The swaying branches of the still-standing dead trees made a mournful sound that more than once caused us to stop our chewing to verify that we weren't hearing someone calling for help. Then again, maybe it was creeps, witches and ghouls.

*You don't have to take my word for it, you could look at the photos. If only I had taken the data card out of the computer before setting off on the hike ....