Awesome Summer Festivals

by Adrienne Wilson on

USA Today gets a round of sound from me today with this
spectacular list of summer
festivals going on all around the states.  I can’t say there isn’t one
I wouldn’t like to be in attendance of as summer has officially kicked-off and I’m thinking of catching at least
one.  The mix is quite eclectic with
events like Mermaid Parades in Coney Island,
Elephant Garlic Festival in North Plains, Oregon and even a
Mighty Mud Mania events in Scottsdale, AZ where you can play in a
muddy obstacle course.  Doesn’t mud and summer just go hand-in-hand? Eh?

Of my own particular interest are the International
Mango Festival in Miami as well as the Huckleberry Festival in Swan Lake, Montana.  Nothing puts a smile on my
face more than good food, especially fresh fruits and an evening of summer sun.  Do yourself a favor and check out
the list for events in your neck of the woods.  There are many more listed with dates and additional
information for the anxious festival goer.

Make Patja

by Adrienne Wilson on

Who’s ready for a gadling cooking challenge?  Let’s even call it a crazy cultural cooking
challenge.  In this article that I stumbled on about
Surinamese food, more specifically
Patja, lies a recipe.  There are no
step-by-step cooking instructions on making the soup as the recipe is only known by the Surinamese Bush Negro
population and cannot be found in cookbooks. 

The overall idea of Patja is a strong bouillon made with either read or white meat.  Beef is the preferred
choice, but many tropical fish will also do the trick.  So if you have any spare jarakaba, red snapper, tilapia,
anumara, or krobia in the fridge, perhaps it’s time to experiment in the kitchen.  Now leftover fish from
isn’t going to do the trick alone as grated bitter cassava is also very important to the bouillon. To sum up
the very lengthy production, it seems as if anything goes with this soup, but if you’ve got the heart and time trying
to make it the very way the Bush Negro population does I’d be curious to know how it turns out.  Sounds like
something that could taste extremely delicious or not so great depending on how you cook it.

If all else fails at least you’ll have one more little piece of info to stash away on the brain.

Camping Cali

by Erik Olsen on

What a pleasure this morning to open up the LA Times and find
a whole section a whole section
dedicated to camping. One of the best things in the world is to head into the wilderness, or even just find a good car
camping spot, and to hang out for a few days beneath the gaping sky. I’ve camped all over the world, Chile, Thailand,
Europe and all over the US.

My favorite spots tend to be in the Northwest where the foliage is lush and cool, and you can almost always find a
gushing stream. But California has some amazing camping areas, especially throughout the Sierras.

The section here has a lot of great recommendations for places to pitch your tent, as well as some thoughts on gear
and somewhat useless camping accessories. A great find as we head into summer.

Paddling Ha Long Bay

by Erik Olsen on

One of the great things about sea kayaking is how the sport allows you to access places that you could probably
never reach by other means. Exploring sea caves and out of the way bays are the things dreams are made of for most sea
kayakers. Here is an article in Canoe and Kayak
Magazine about a small group who take inflatable kayaks into Ha Long Bay in Vietnam.

Lugging along almost 500 pounds of gear, including freeze-dried food, climbing equipment, tents, and inflatable
kayaks, the group explores huge limestone towers and tiny uninhabited islands in one of the more exotic regions of the
world. The paddlers set up camp in a gorgeous sea cave and build a fire like their forebears, savoring every moment,
even when storms rush in and give them a momentary meteorological bitch slap.

Kayakers of all stripes will enjoy this piece.

One Minute Vacation for Your Ears

by Erik Olsen on

I’ve posted about the site One Minute Vacations before, but
it’s always fun to check in when they have posted new stuff. it’s such a cool concept: these small sound files are
available for download and capture a single minute, a single moment in a place that is probably quite far away from
where you are sitting at this instant. In this one
here, a Swedish artist named Wolgang Peter Menzel goes to Macau.

Here is what he says about the piece:

“You are running in the streets — looking around and listening to the traffic, staring at people, you wonder where you
are, all your senses are touched by new things, smells and impressions of a complete “differentness” compared to what
you are used to; it overwhelms your person, this slowly getting into this condition of phenomenological basic behavior.
That is what happened to me there, at a street corner in the Chinese part of the former Portuguese colony Macau, at
least — even the traffic light sound became something else.”

Close your eyes and listen.