Summer Drive

December 24, 2020, Guerneville, CA

I am in Davis today, it is December 24 and it is cold and foggy.  I thought I would bring out some pictures taken this summer on Harrison Grade Road and Green Valley Road between Occidental and Guerneville and on the river and in Sebastopol.  The day was warm and the top was down and it was a great time exploring roads we’d never been on before.  And they are right in our backyard.  We drove by a field that had these three Jerseys in it.  These are lactating cows, not dry, not beef cows but milk cows.  Who runs a string of three cows?  Maybe for fluid milk or butter or cheese making for one house?  I’ll go back sometime to try and get the story.  Anyway, here they are:

And, Jerseys are hard to milk by hand.  I wonder if they have a vacuum system set up?

The gatehouse on the road, between Hwy 116 and River Road, to the Odd Fellows Recreational Club on the Russian River:

The seasonal bridge across the Russian River just below the club:

The view looking upriver from the bridge:

Stopped at Harmony Farm Supply in Sebastopol to get some vegetable plants:

And the next morning, looking out from the deck across Korbel’s vineyard to the ridge with some wispy fog hanging over the grapes:

Nice day, already can’t wait for summer to return.

Baking Taralli

December 19, 2020 Davis, CA

Everyone around us, well two people, are making Italian pretzels (taralli) and Lynn could not stand to sit idly by. So Thursday morning she said, “I would like to make tarallis on Sunday.”  Later that afternoon she changed it to Saturday. There was no use in resisting, this was something that simply had to be done and I like to eat them too so the die was cast.  So here we go on Saturday at 11am, kneading the dough for a five pound batch:

You can roll out pieces of the dough by hand but we use a modified sausage maker to push out cords of dough.  Here’s the sausage maker we use to extrude the dough.  To give credit where credit is due this funnel attachment was devised, so my sources tell me, by the late Al Pepin.  A man with a flair for mechanics, he must have watched the taralli makers in his family struggle to roll out consistently sized cords of dough and saw a better way.  We are a country of dreamers:

The extruder loaded with dough and ready for action:

Five pounds of dough rolled out into the traditional shape:

Break time in the kitchen and it’s Bloody Marys all around:

Now they have to be boiled, it doesn’t take too long to do the whole batch:

Drop them in one at a time, when they float to the surface they’re ready to come out:

Like so:

After they boil they are ready for the oven, I’ll have to check with the chef for time and temperature.  I’ll get back to you:

Et voila, just right:

So now let’s relax and enjoy them: