once again i find myself out of town on webnesday, and this time i didn't quite make it to the interweb punctually enough. hopefully i can compensate in future weeks - i'm in wellington visiting the national museum, and chances of me scuttling into the spider collections for a side tour are high!
in the meantime i will carry on the australian theme from last week - tomboy sent me these photos of a lovely huntsman (family Sparassidae) she encountered some time during her early weeks. looks like this one had seen some tough times - it's missing two legs ('just an insect now' was the wry comment from te papa's spider man).
i may have died and gone to heaven.
ironically, my euphoria stems from someone else's departure and my subsequent inheritance - of this, the largest aggregation of german/austrian packaged foods i have encountered outside of europe or waldsee:
oh man.
i was already celebrating a return to our winter mealplan, which heavily features stew with yorkshire pudding, spätzle and goulasch, many variations on the pasta theme, and a goodly number of soups accompanied by the pebbles' unparalleled cheese scones. and now - well, bring on the cold, the hibernation, the wafting steamy smells from the kitchen, the carb-loading and subsequent couch-bound food comas!
i have plans for pretty much every item in the above photo except the kaiserschmarr'n (which i loathe - free to a good home!). and the lineup extends through the dark winter months and marches stodgily on until about daylight savings next october. i haven't had kartoffelgulasch since i was little. i adore semmelknödel and would probably choose them as my preferred eventual cause of death. i am intrigued by the aranzini. tiramisu - i don't even need to say anything about that!
and this little teutonic food bonanza is wildly exciting for other reasons than just its good emotional associations. having just re-read barbara kingsolver's wonderful animal, vegetable, miracle (about her family's year of eating all local foods, sourced within a 200-mile radius from their home), i have also been trying to buy more locally and eat more seasonally. we've been heading to the local farmer's market on sundays and preparing some meals based on what we find there. admittedly many of the huge-scale problems with agriculture in the US (beef raised on CAFOs, for instance) don't really occur in nz - thank god. but we've begun to look at our groceries and try not to buy wildly out-of-season or exotic foods - snow peas from africa, asparagus in april, beverages that had to be shipped from overseas. this rare windfall of european culinary goodness can, however, be enjoyed in good conscience, since (1) we didn't purchase it here and contribute to its local demand, and (2) if we hadn't taken it, it might have been hauled back overseas.
oh, and (3) the other candidates for receiving it here couldn't read the labels. ;)
last post about australia for now, i swear. i just want to wrap it up with a few shots from the coast, since we went for a couple of good walks on the beaches. we all know i have a thing for sand, so it seems only fitting. plus this was the kind of squeaky sand that sounds like corduroy rubbing against itself when you walk through it. i'm sure no one i was with got at all tired of me scuffing my feet.
it only seems right that this webnesday should feature aussie arachnids. unfortunately, our visit was rather poor in that department - we saw a lovely spiderweb in a shaft of sunlight, and a few little brown guys scuttling around in the sand on the beach. no idea on their ID at all, and 'sand spider' (and related searches) mostly turn up solifugids. which these definitely aren't - solis aren't even spiders, so whatever. my best guess is some kind of small lycosid (wolf spider).
and i know there are cool spiders over there because my dad has seen them - here's another of his photos. he mentioned that the focus isn't perfect because this spider was large and fast-moving, and he didn't want to get too close, not knowing what it was at the time.
no trip abroad is complete without making a fuss over the local fauna. although the more dangerous beasts of oz kept their distance (no snakes, blue-ringed octos or particularly bitey spiders), we did have some nice run-ins with the scaly and feathered. ibises, although introduced, are now pretty ubiquitous in the cities.
lorikeets swooped regularly through the back yard of the pebbles-in-law, brightening the rain with their tropical colors and cheeky chat.
magpies, which are a terrible pest in new zealand, are at least tolerated in aus (where they're native). and their fluting song makes a nice wake-up call.
here we are, back from our little jaunt to brisbane / gold coast over easter. it was great to see the pebbles-in-law and to catch up with tomboy. there were easter egg hunts, water fights, frogmouth and fruit-bat sightings, and even enough breaks in the rain and clouds to allow a few excursions. we spent a night in brisbane before the obligatory ikea pilgrimage and went for nice walks along south bank, investigated the university of queensland (lovely campus!) and went for walks on the beach. we realized we'd been traveling to brisbane together for over five years - it was our first joint overseas destination. (all together now - awwww.) and still, we managed not to see any migrating whales - every time we visit we hear that humpbacks are commonly sighted off shore at certain times of year (and we were pretty sure that included easter), and every time we somehow manage to miss them. true to form, we heard yesterday that the day after we left, dolphins were sighted just meters off shore from one of the spots we'd been to while visiting. ah well, the birds and herps put on a good show - will post them over the next few days.
hi from australia, all you arachnophiles. since i am overseas and constrained by a dial-up connection, this week's edition is something of a cop-out, but it's the best i can do from here. in lieu of personally observed, borrowed or interweb-pilfered beasties, i give you something interactive to play with. back to our normal programming next week. :)
sooo, it's good friday, and i'm at work, and i feel a cold coming on. our original plans for easter had us scheduled to fly to cairns today and be sleeping aboard a dive boat on the way out to the great barrier reef tonight. sadly, the company we wanted to go with - the only company that did research as well as dumping tourists in the water to poke the pretty fishies (sorry, impending cold snark) - folded in february. rescheduling with a different operator would have cost us about $1500 each and we didn't feel that good about going with one of the non-eco outfits.
we decided to head over to australia anyway and visit the pebbles' dad and stepmom in gold coast, and to catch up with tomboy for the first time in a year. so tomorrow we head out in the afternoon, to start sunning ourselves and avoiding sharp, poisonous things for five days. (by which i mean the aussie fauna of course. what did you think?) if i get lucky, maybe i'll come back with some wicked new spider pics. if i get unlucky, maybe i'll get back with some wicked new spider pics and fond memories of a recent trip to the emergency room. in which case a large haul of new stuff from our closest ikea (brisbane) will be necessary to assuage the trauma.
the weekend should bring merry reunions, cheese fondue, chocolate eggs and maybe even a vampire dinner show. bring it on! and in honor of the star-crossed cancelled dive trip and the spring (heh) fertility festival, i give you our own local brand of pastel easter eggs... from the arrow squid, Nototodarus gouldii. courtesy of tony enderby.
Phidippus audax is probably the first spider species i fell in love with. its black-and-white body and vivid green chelicerae are simply stunning, and of course it's a charismatic salticid. i didn't stand a chance, really. just look at it...
(courtesy of opo terser via wikipedia)... but i was too late.
and so, until life presents me the opportunity to collect my own shots, i must content myself with the luck of others. by the way, that photographer, opo terser, seems to have a disproportionate amount of spider luck, although he is certainly a photographer who deserves it - check out the other images and these wonderful videos.
Macro video of female P. audax
Juvenile P. audax eating harvestman
i don't think i've ever posted a recipe here before. but the pebbles and i have undertaken a personal challenge to make at least one new recipe each week for the first year we're married (almost six months so far and still going strong), and yesterday, we found a definite winner, so i pass it on to you.
homemade beans on toast
(based on/improved from this jamie oliver recipe)
2 cans white beans (cannellini, butter, mixed, whatever) or an equal
amount of dried, soaked beans
3 peeled garlic cloves
a few sprigs fresh thyme
3 bay leaves
1 potato, peeled and halved
a few cherry tomatoes, or one larger tomato, halved
olive oil
vinegar
a few sprigs fresh basil, chopped
salt & pepper
dash of worcestershire sauce
slices of your favorite bread
wash beans; place into deep pot and cover with cold water. throw in garlic, thyme, bay leaves, potato and tomato(es). bring slowly to boil. cover with lid and simmer for about 30 mins, longer if using dried/soaked beans. when fragrant, drain everything in a colander, reserving enough cooking water to re-cover beans halfway up when put back in pot. remove and discard bay leaves; remove garlic, potato and tomatoes. pinch skin off tomatoes. mash garlic, tomatoes and potato together on a plate, then stir back into beans. season with salt and pepper, add olive oil, vinegar, worcestershire, and fresh chopped basil. serve on toasted bread.
in hindsight, i should have also added the leftover chicken gravy i had in the fridge, and saved the cooking
water that wasn't needed for the beans themselves afterward to use later as the base for a soup. but the beans were delicious in any case!
