Columbish

It was a holiday weekend, and we did stuff!

1. I made two kinds of eggplant bread for carpenter's eggplant party, and neither of them killed anybody! This came as a mild surprise, since both were experiments: a variation on my pepperoni bread with sautéed eggplant / onions / garlic instead of pepperoni, which turned out crusty and olive-oily and Mediterranean; and a cheesy zucchini bread with eggplant instead of zucchini, which, apparently, works. I treated this like an eggplant Quickfire Challenge, and found success.


2. I wasn't at the party as much as I might've been, since I spent an hour or two at Honk!toberfest: dancing on the Harvard Square T entrance, hunting down a caramel apple for kdsorceress, and taking photos of brass bands in fuzzy pink top hats and alternachicks up trees in rainbow leggings. It's a noisy, silly, joyous time — I should make more time for it next year.


3. adfamiliares and I went apple-picking! It was a 45-minute drive to Stow (tourist bureau motto: Stow It!) and Shelburne Farm, featuring hot cider donuts, bunny rabbits, a llama, and most of the population of Boston (with their children). They also had a kazillion apple trees — McIntosh, Cortland, Macoun, Empire, Red Delicious, and Spencer were available for picking. I carted about a ladder to get at the higher branches, and ate an apple right off the tree — and when I say "right off the tree," I mean I took a bite while it was dangling from the branch. Mmmm. (I was not in Oz, fortunately.) We came home with a half a bushel of apples, with no way to tell which are which, because they all look exactly the same, except for Red Delicious, which we did not pick any of, and a pumpkin. Still, hooray for apples! And agritainment!