miracles of modern science

...or crimes against nature, depending on your perspective. allow me to explain.

i've ordered a number of fruit trees to plant in our new yard from raintreenursery.com and ediblelandscaping.com, which is a virginia nursery specializing as you might guess, edible landscaping. i'm actually pretty excited. i've order blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, a variety of kiwi propagated from a specimen growing on a fence at the national arboretum in DC, a persimmon tree, an apple tree and a fruit cocktail tree.

a what?

a fruit cocktail tree. yeah, i never heard of it before either. (thanks tobin!)

commercial fruit trees are not grown from seeds. if they were, you'd never know exactly what kind of quality fruit you'd get because the seed would have genetic material from two different trees. so let's say you want red delicious apples. you grow a root system, cut it off above the ground and graft on sprig cut from a red delicious tree. the two parts fuse together and you get an tree with roots from one type of apple tree and branches and fruit from another.

well if one graft is good, obviously more is better. turns out that you can graft multiple types of fruit from the same family onto the same rootstock. so for instance, the apple tree i order has grafts from akane, jonagold, gala and spartan apples. the fruit cocktail tree is either a plum or a peach root system and grows four different kinds of stone fruit: peaches, plums, apricots & nectarines.

if anyone knows where i can get a lemon, lime and blood orange or clementine tree, let me know!

honeymoon - day 8

today we woke up in our temporary house in pemaquid point, provided to us by one of my mother's wonderful friends. after hanging around for a bit and having some coffee we decided to head into the nearest town (damariscotta, me) for some eats, where once again we ran into some sort of fall festival. they had giant pumpkins, carved and uncarved up and down the street and i heard someone talking about a regatta in the harbor. we had a great meal at the salt bay cafe and then walked around to look at the giant pumpkins.




then we walked across the street and behind a row of buildings where we found the pumpkin growing contest winners. basically, they are some sort of unholy radioactive miracle-gro pumpkins that given the opportunity would probably try and overthrow the united states. they were so big they had to be brought in on a trailer. the winner was 1129lbs.



then we walked over to the water where we saw a few of the remaining regatta entrants straggling up the boat ramp.



yes, you are in fact looking at what i presume to be a father and son motoring around in 6hp pumpkin. this was not just any old regatta. this was a pumpkin regatta. here are some pics of a few of the other "boats" that had already been pulled out of the water. i have no idea where to begin describing how awesome an idea this is. i'm pretty sure i would enter if i was a local.

world's best empanadas, now twice as good

laura just found half-off gift certificates for cuba de ayer in burtonsville. get 'em while you can. http://halfoffdc.com

everything should taste like bacon

with few exceptions, that is a true statement (things that should *not* taste like bacon are ice cream, coffee and maybe vodka, but bacon whiskey would be okay). you used to have to put those crusty little bacos on everything which only vaguely tasted like bacon and were made out of some sort of byproduct from manufacturing car tires. then they came out with the "bag o' bacon" product. real bacon crumbles in a zip-top bag, convenient for sprinkling on top of your salad or baked potato, but not, say for popcorn or french fries. today the game has changed with the recent discovery of bacon salt, a product from JD's. available in natural, original, hickory and peppered. it's vegetarian, has zero calories and you can put it on ANYTHING.

on second thought, maybe i should give bacon ice cream a chance.

things i would hump - cuba de ayer empanadas

i just ate four of them. two beef, two chicken. they are, as dave put it, "mind blowing". fried golden brown, spicy, crunchy, a little bit sweet and absolutely delicious. now i'm no empanada expert, but i've had a few and as far as i can tell, these are the best empanadas ever made. dave told our server how much he liked the them, at which point the server claimed that argentinian empanadas are even better. now, while i find this highly unlikely, i feel that however improbably, if true, is certainly worth investigating. we asked if he knew where we could get some and he suggested an argentinian baker in miami, which was not exactly a lot of help. so if anyone knows where i can find some around DC, dave and i would love to hear about it.

cuba de ayer is off of 198 in burtsonville, between rt 29 and old columbia pike. it's easy to miss, but worth the hunt. all of the food there is excellent and reasonably priced. oh, and if you do go, try the empanadas, i hear they are pretty good.

miracles of modern technology

now, i know that some people probably think that this is some sort of altruistic research project to help disabled people or some other nonsense. but i know what is really going on here, and i'm pretty sure it has something to do with a new japanese game show. the two most awesome things in the world have been brought together in what can only be described as a miracle. and no, i am not talking about the XFL. i'm talking about monkeys and robots. scientists have created the perfect marriage of simian and machine, resulting in what i can only hope is the most entertaining development of our lifetimes.


in related news, three japanese scientiest were killed in a bionic poo-flinging incident.