At the beginning of the month, Eli and I ventured South to our CSA, Big Woods Farm, for their annual Midsummer Farm Festival. We had a wonderful time, visiting with our farmers and their family, as well as some of the other families that are members of the farm (even one other member family from the Twin Cities!).

As everyone gathered, we chatted and introduced ourselves, then began shucking corn for the potluck dinner. The corn from Big Woods is so delicious, even fresh-picked and raw. We found that out our first year at this festival, when David brought us out for a farm tour and had us eat ears of corn right in the fields. I had never known that you could eat corn raw! But it was amazing: so sweet and cool and crisp. Quite a fun new experience!

This corn, however, was destined to be cooked for dinner. And there was plenty of it!

David also cooked up some hot dogs over an open fire, and there was an amazing spread of dishes to choose from for the rest of our meal. From salads to coleslaws, lasagnas to New Orleans-style dirty rice.

It was so wonderful to see how many of the dishes were made with ingredients grown right where we were gathered, and by people who cared so deeply for the land and for local food.

And did I mention there were tons of freshly-picked cherry tomatoes?

And then there were desserts…

We brought my curried zucchini bread, there was a delightful fruit crisp and some tasty cookies. And there were s’more fixings for later.

But frankly, I was so full after eating my dinner that I didn’t have much room for dessert.

Giggly, a photography book by Leora Effinger-Weintraub

Giggly, my photography book that collected images from the glorious Giggly Hills area near the Mississippi river in South Minneapolis, is now available on Issuu. You can view the entire book online, without having to download the rather large PDF file.

You may still download the book, of course, from the Giggly page on the SoFoBoMo site. It remains under a Creative Commons license, so please feel free to share it, with a link to my site so people can find more of my work.

And for a tiny preview of the Issuu version of Giggly, you can flip through the preview below. Click on the center of the preview to view it in fullscreen mode, or view it on the Issuu website. Ah, the wonders of the internet…

Giggly, a photography book by Leora Effinger-Weintraub

I’d like to announce a very special Free Friday offering here at Leora the Sane: my very first photography book!

Giggly is a collection of photographs taken in the Giggly Hills area near our home in South Minneapolis. I created this book as part of SoFoBoMo, an international group event where photographers create solo photography books over the course of one month, from shooting the photographs to layout of the book, to creating the PDF file and posting it for the world to see.

Giggly excerpt, Bee on wildflower

You can download my book at the Giggly page on the SoFoBoMo website. The file is rather large (12.4 mb). So be aware of your bandwidth if you decide to download the file. Giggly is released under my usual Creative Commons, noncommercial-noderivatives license. You are free to share this work, but please attribute it to me and link to my site.

You will soon be able to view Giggly online at Issuu (I’m working on getting it uploaded and into their system). Updated: You can now view Giggly online on Issuu. Issuu will allow you to view the book without having to download it. Good for those with bandwidth restrictions!

Giggly excerpt, picnic under oak tree

This was a great project for me, as it helped me immensely in seeing just what it takes to create a book. Even if, for now, that book exists only electronically. I have created Giggly at a size that will permit me to possibly get it printed through a print-on-demand company that specializes in photography books, just so that I can see it in print. And I’ve also toyed around with the idea of creating a very limited edition of hand-bound artist books. We’ll see where it goes…

Giggly excerpt, bikes in the shade

I feel like I have the skills now to take my ever-growing collection of photographs and do something more with them, besides look at them on my own screen. That’s something I’ve wanted for quite some time. To have the ability to take my art to its next place, wherever that may be, a book, a collection of prints, or something I may not have even thought of yet.

I hope you have enjoyed these photo excerpts from the book. Click on any of the photos to view them larger. And then please download the book to enjoy the whole work and share it freely. After all, it is Free Friday!

Have a great weekend!

Orange Lily, in the backyard

On Saturday, I took some time to smell the flowers… and take their pictures.

We have a couple of different types of lilies in our yard, plus some phlox and creeping purple bell flower (which might be a weed, depending on how you look at it, but it’s flower is kind of cute).

Spotted Lily, in the front yard

It was a fun chance for me to get out of the house on a gorgeous afternoon and play with the camera. All of these were taken with my 50 mm lens, so this was more great practice with manual focus. And since it was manual focus, it doesn’t so much work with the automatic “macro” settings on the camera. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get anything like a good close-up shot, but was pleasantly surprised with the results. I will probably want to look at macro-specific gear at some point in the future, since I love taking macro shots so much. But at least I know that I can get some good photographs in that area with the gear that I have.

Phlox

These are just a few of the photographs I brought back inside with me. I’m just starting to sort through them and edit them. More may get posted later, if I find more stars.

Creeping purple bell flower

Enjoy!

Cote d'Azur through Window

Almost 12 years ago, I took a little trip to France. It was my graduation gift to myself, after completing my degree in French (crazy, huh?). I spent a little over five weeks there, about two weeks in Paris, about a week and a half on the riviera between Marseille and Nice, a week in Brittany, and a few days in transit by train.

Yesterday, Eli and I bought a new print/scanner/multipurpose device. We found that while it is super-snazzy, it doesn’t have the ability to scan negatives. This brought my mind back to that old trip and all the photos I took, almost all on film. My digital photos from that trip are long lost in the craziness of transferring from computer to cimputer to computer over the past 12 years. Somewhere many years ago, they got erased. Its too bad, but they were mostly just photos I took in museums and not those from the landscapes around me. If I really need to know about the art I saw, I can get at most of it online nowadays. I’ll just keep telling myself that…

Marina

But those photos I took on film filled quite a few rolls and two nice photo albums. Before I get the printer set up tomorrow, I wanted to see how well the old printer/scanner/thing worked for scanning negatives. Now that we’ve had it for over four years and haven’t used that function once. Silly me.

From above

Turns out that it works fairly decently. Not well enough to make prints from. But that’s just fine, because I still have the negatives if I ever need prints. But for blogging or what-have-you, it’s kind of nice to be able to get some of my old photographs together in the same place with the new. I am pretty proud of some of these old photos. They have a glimmer of vision, and I can see that my artistic voice was just getting started back then. It’s a nice blast from the past.

Rocks and Azure

The shots in this post are all from the Marseille leg of my trip. The first shot, above, is of the Mediterranean as seen through one of the windows of the Chateau d’If, an island prison off the coast that was one of the settings of The Count of Monte Cristo. This shot is one of my favorites when I think of my early photography.

A Church

I may post more throughout the summer as I wade through these old negatives. I’ll have to keep the old printer just long enough to get them scanned in.

Great post at The Quantum Biologist, found via @inktea on Twitter. The Green Man: “I think I could forgo all the meat in the world to know what it’s like to step outside, turn my face and palms to the sun, and be fully nourished in my body as I am in my soul. I’d like to eat light. I’d like to live with hunger in my skin.”

It is well and truly CSA season. And with the season comes knowledge that we have a lot of veggies to eat. Every year, Eli and I figure things out a little more quickly. I think we’ve got it down now; when we make our list on Sunday morning we make sure to include something (or multiple somethings) from the share for every meal.

Last night it was turnips. I love the spring turnips we got a couple of weeks ago. They are lovely, little darlings. About the size of hacky-sacks, maybe 1 1/2″ to 2″ in diameter. Because they are harvested early in the season, they are milder than the bigger turnips we’ll get later. They are very tasty fried up like the traditional pan-fried potatoes my mom used to make when I was little. And towards the end of the season, we’ve been known to use them in baked strata, like au gratin but with turnips in place of potatoes.

But last night, we wanted something a little different. You may be sensing a trend here, but we turned to the potato again for inspiration and decided to make turnip latkes. They were so simply to pull together, but absolutely delicious. The turnips brought a complexity of flavor you just can’t get from a potato. We also threw in some surprisingly sweet yellow onion and whole wheat pastry flour. I just can’t resist exchanging whole wheat pastry flour for all-purpose when cooking; it adds a delightful nuttiness to my recipes and makes things just a little bit better for me. An egg, salt, and fresh ground pepper rounded out a very easy recipe. The only thing that took time was frying them up in my cast-iron skillet. Next time I think I’ll use the two-burner griddle. I’ll probably have them done in about half the cooking time.

Served with a dollop of plain yoghurt on each latke and a sprinkling of slivered garlic scapes, these are divine!

Tasty Turnip Latkes

inspired by Deb’s recipe for potato pancakes at Smitten Kitchen

Ingredients

• about six 1 1/2″ – 2″ spring turnips
• about 3.5 ounces sweet yellow onion (I used about half of a medium onion, but if you have a small onion of this weight, use the whole thing)
• one quarter cup whole wheat pastry flour
• one large egg
• one large pinch salt (sorry I can’t more exact, but that’s what I did! You can try about 1/2 tsp if you need to measure, then salt them after you cook them if it’s not enough)
• one small pinch fresh ground black pepper
• oil for frying (I used olive oil because it’s what I had around, but use any oil you prefer, or even butter!)
• garnish: yoghurt, sliced garlic scape, or whatever you desire

Equipment

• One medium mixing bowl
• One grater
• cutting board and knife
• skillet or griddle

What to do

1. Grate your turnips. Then squeeze out as much liquid as you can. I usually put them in two layers of paper towels and wring. Works like a charm. Put your grated turnips in your mixing bowl.
2. Slice your onion fine. Then cut your slices to about 1″ long. You should end up with thin onion slices that are around the size of your turnip gratings. Neat! Put them in your bowl, too.
3. Add the flour, egg, salt, and pepper. Mix until combined.
4. Over medium heat, heat oil on your frying surface (skillet or griddle).
5. When a drop of water dances on the pan (or however else you decide that it’s ready), place mixture on pan in rounds about 3 1/2″ to 4″ in diameter.
6. Cook until brown on one side, about 2 minutes or so, then flip and cook the other side.
7. If cooking in batches, keep warm in the oven set low or in the toaster oven set at about 200-250°.
8. Serve warm with your chosen garnish. We loved them with plain yoghurt and sliced garlic scapes.

Enjoy!

As part of our recovery from CON, Eli and I took a little bicycle picnic to the Giggly Hills area by the river yesterday. We brought cookies from Fireroast Mountain, and sat about for what felt like hours (but was probably not). We danced around in a field of clover, watched bees gathering pollen in a sea of wildflowers, were visited by many local puppies (and their owners). It was a gorgeous afternoon, interrupted only briefly by a short rainshower. What a great way to unwind from what has been months of nonstop activity.

I brought my camera and took many photos, which will hopefully make their way into a SoFoBoMo book (Solo Photo Book Month, much like NaNoWriMo, but for photographers). More info on that to follow as I work on the many hours of editing and layout ahead of me (which is sometimes the most fun part!).

Dazzling light and comforting shade

This is just one of those many photographs, of the sun shining down through the branches of a lovely, huge oak tree.

This year’s CONvergence was jam packed for the Effinger-Weintraubs. My darling wife gave a great run-down of just how very much we did during our weekend. It was great fun, crazy busy, and rather epic all at once. We saw so many people and had so many things to do, it was hard to even take the time to think about it until we got home.

But now we’re home, and have had a week of work to recover from a weekend of play. (How that works, don’t ask… ) And I can say that it was by far one of the best, if not the very best, CON I’ve been to. And I’m not just thinking of the CONs I’ve been to with Eli. Afterall, I used to go to CON with the Js for years before I met my wife. (And it’s crazy weird running into everyone now that I used to hang with back then. Many of them don’t even recognize me after all of the weight I’ve lost, which I suppose is another post…)

So all this is my way of saying that with all the fun and all of the stuff we did, I hope it is understandable why I didn’t take a ton of pictures. I really should have, new camera and all. But I kept forgetting to bring it with me out of the hotel room. And when I did bring it, I kept forgetting to take it out and snap those pictures. I think there is definitely a place for good old point-and-shoot cameras, and CON is one of them.

I did manage to take a bunch of pictures during the T-Shirt Modification workshop we taught with fayde, birdfigment, and Katie. As did Eli. We just need to finish sorting and editing those still, so that will be another post. But for now, here are some photos from out and about at CONvergence 2010.

So on Memorial weekend, we took that trip up north and visited with my extended family for my cousin’s high school graduation. It was a great time, as I mentioned in an earlier post, although we spent far more time with the rest of the family than the guest of honor.

In particular, we spent a lot of time ooh-ing and aah-ing over my cousin Levi’s twin baby daughters. His wife Lisa brought them over during the party and they were instantly the center of attention. Oh, the photographs that were taken! Too many to count. I took a ton and I know that I wasn’t the only one. Levi himself was able to join us a little while later, and I got some more photographs with him and his girls.

Lisa and Levi were gracious enough to give me permission to post my photographs of their girls here on my blog, so here they are.

Enjoy!

These shots are an exception to my usual Creative Commons license. Due to the nature of their content, I have decided to keep full copyright, all rights reserved. Please enjoy them here, but do not take them or use them elsewhere. Thank you!