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Vilas Zoo

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Tiger Through the Trees

Tiger Through the Trees

Last Sat­ur­day morn­ing, Veron­ica and I headed to Madison’s free Vilas Zoo. We met our friends Yi Hong and Steve there shortly after open­ing time, hop­ing to beat the crowds. Lit­tle did we know that the Green and Gold Train­ing Camp was going on that morn­ing, and hun­dreds of lit­tle Pack­ers fans and their par­ents had descended on the zoo. Luck­ily, the crowd mostly stayed occu­pied with things other than look­ing at the animals.

Iguana

Iguana

Although we’d been to the zoo a cou­ple of times before, we’d missed out on a few ani­mals and areas. This was the first time we saw the tiger in its enclo­sure; pre­vi­ously, there had just been signs up say­ing “Exhibit Closed.” We also ven­tured into the her­petar­ium, in which you can get pretty close to some of the snakes and rep­tiles (see left). A new Children’s Zoo with a play­ground and carousel opened a year or so ago, but we hadn’t real­ized that the area actu­ally houses more ani­mals — a red pan­das, a pair of meerkats, some white cock­a­toos and a huge African porcupine.

Click the pho­tos above for larger ver­sions, or check out the whole gallery here.

CSA Box Number Three

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The Contents of Our Third Box

The Con­tents of Our Third Box

This morn­ing, we picked up our third CSA box of the sum­mer. This box was the biggest yet — 3/4 bushel, whereas our pre­vi­ous boxes were only 5/9 bushel. Plus, this time our farm offered basil as an ‘option’ crop, mean­ing that they left a huge box full of it at our pickup loca­tion and said “take as much as you want.” Since I neglected to bring a bag, I lit­er­ally stuffed my pock­ets full of basil. Tomor­row, we’ll make a big batch of pesto and freeze it in single-meal por­tions with the help of a cou­ple of ice cube trays. Our goal is to make enough while basil is in sea­son to make it through the win­ter (we eat lots of pasta).

While we have no doubt what to do with the basil, we’re not so sure about some of the other items. What, if any­thing, can you do with pick­ling cucum­bers other than pickle them? Can the two of us pos­si­bly make it through four reg­u­lar cucum­bers before they go bad? What should we do with beets? Can we find a way to pre­pare our cau­li­flower that we’ll actu­ally like? What’s spe­cial about Cip­polini onions? But, we’ve done pretty well with unfa­mil­iar veg­gies so far, so I’m sure we’ll have some inter­est­ing culi­nary adven­tures this week!

Happy 4th of July!

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In honor of Inde­pen­dence Day, here are some shots I took last night of the Elver Park Fire­works dis­play in Madison:

Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks
Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks
Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks
Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks
Fireworks Fireworks Fireworks

Click each pic for a larger version