Food of the Season

Right next to each other at the farmer's market are two well-matched stalls:
the Squash Farm folks and the Honey Guy, who sells honey and beeswax candles. And, for the last couple weeks, fresh cranberries from a Wisconsin bog.

When I asked how to cook the cranberries, the seller said to pile them into the hollows (where you've scooped out the seeds) of a halved squash--acorn squash is a good one--with a little honey.
I added some fresh grated ginger too.

Bake on a cookie sheet in a 400 degree oven for about 45 minutes, until the squash is soft. The time required varies by size.

The squash and cranberries come out gleaming orange and red, like the season.

The Jaguar's Call

Easier for humans than a magpie's call, you can roughly approximate a jaguar's call by coughing as you say, "uh-uh-uh-uh-uh."

Magpie Calls

I was rummaging around looking for info about magpies--do they really pick up bright things to put in their nests? I didn't find that information, but I found these alluring words that try to capture what magpies sound like:

Call: a harsh, chattering "wock, wock wock-a-wock, wock, pjur, weer, weer."

You can listen to them at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's magpie page:
magpie sounds

Sunday Morning

One of the things I have missed most about blogging (it's been two years) is having a place to keep found words--things I overhear, for instance, or bits and pieces of writing--like a nest where magpies keep objects that catch their fancy.

So, it is fitting that as I locked my bike up here at Bob's coffee shop, where I had come to start a blog but was uncertain what I'd write about, I found a scrap of a grocery list by my feet, in the gutter. And such a morning list, with pleasing spelling variations:

orange ju
Basic 4 ceareal
Milk 2%
bananas
cinnimon rason bagels