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1st official hike of the year

The 2007 hiking season has begun anew. Last weekend we went to Chestnut Ridge Metro Park, about 35 miles southwest of us.  It’s actually the first trace of the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, and the southwest corner of Ohio glaciation.  They call it a “ridge”, which should have been a warning to us. It’s actually about 1,000 feet high! Quite an uphill trek.  We got a great view of Columbus, about 20 miles away, from that height:

At the very top of the ridge was an old homestead, now abandoned, where some eccentric once tried to start a weirdness orchard. Orchard consisted of peaches, nuts, grapes, holly, cane berries, and bamboo.  Bamboo on top of a ridge in Ohio! Say hi to my wife in the bamboo jungle of Ohio:

A couple nice streams ran down the side of the ridge, opportunity for posed contemplation:

And signs of spring:

Anyone reading this is hereby extended an open invitation to join us on our weekly Ohio hikes. Hope you can keep up with Luke!

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St Pat’s Dinner

I cooked our family St Patrick’s Day dinner last night, nice and fairly traditional.  Lentil soup and Ham & Cabbage (Boiled Dinner).  Let’s begin at the beginning, with the soup and the trio of sauteed veggies:

Hey, look at that: it’s the tricolor!

This was the resulting soup.  Soup of the evening, beautiful soup!

And of course, the main course, of course: ham and cabbage with potatoes, onions, and carrots:

“My Daddy makes me proud to be Irish! Yummy!”

(Trivia: of course, the Irish in Erin would not have had corned beef with their cabbage.  Ham or mutton were far more traditional over on the Old Sod.  But when our ancestors made their way to New England and New York, they encountered our Yiddish friends, who (eating no pork) had developed the delicacy known as corned beef, cheaper than ham and more plentiful in the US.  Thus Corned Beef and Cabbage is an American dish, with Irish and Jewish roots.  I (eating no beef) opted for the more traditional dish, which is just as tasty))

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