We're blushing!

Joe and Karen's Arizona Adventure:
February 20
February 21

Frisky stoat

BBC News has a video sure to delight my mustelid-loving husband. There might have been Bridled Weasels doing the same thing in southern Arizona today after last night's snowfall.

¡Viva Pink Floyd!

Courtesy of our friend and fellow Pink Floyd fan Eduardo Gomez, mariachis (and I use that term generically since they're not all playing traditional instruments) rock the house at Hussong's Cantina in Ensenada, south of San Diego in Baja California Norte:



And they do Credence, too!

Ah, if we could find such a band in Sonora, what a fantastic cultural addition that would be to our birding tours....

--SW

Halloween memories

I promised to post a few photos from this year's Halloween celebration in Bisbee, and here they are.

It was quite a party. Brewery Gulch was the place to be, with a street dance benefit for a local charity in front of the Copper Queen Hotel, raucous festivities at St. Elmo's and the Stock Exchange Bar, and bizarre apparitions crowding the sidewalks.

Tom's costume got a few puzzled reactions, but most of the locals caught on right away ("Look at the horny toad!"). There were lots of compliments, particularly on his hand-crafted mask, but the best reaction of the night was from a woman who had done research on Flat-tailed Horned Lizards in California.The immobility of a mask is a challenge to character development, so I spiced things up with crouching posture, slinking walk, exaggerated head and hand movements, and eerie silence calculated to weird people out. The reactions were an interesting mix. Men seemed particularly uncomfortable with not knowing the gender of the person inside the costume, but a couple of women were thoroughly charmed by the froggie (a tipsy nerd girl even planted a smooch on my big green snout). The most disturbing comment was from a twenty-something guy who shouted, "Hey! What are you? I've never seen you in no movie!" I just gave my head a quizzical twist and gestured cryptically with my long red sleeves before slinking on up the street.

Late in the evening we ran into friends Liz and Jim. Liz made a great "Thriller" zombie, so it was a pity that the only Michael Jackson the street dance DJ played was "Billie Jean." Jim always manages to come up with a really creepy concept; this year his all-black ensemble with long coat. bowler hat, and face-concealing veil accented with a bone-pale sinuous walking stick brought to mind both Rene Magritte and the shadowy back streets of New Orleans.


The flip side of Jim's persona, hidden beneath a white lace-trimmed shroud, was leading the drum circle at Goar Park; Tom joined in on pickle bucket.


Next year, time and finances permitting, I promise that we'll do new costumes, maybe back to birds. Suggestions, anyone?

Tangy Tuna Treats

Is this the pinkest pink lemonade you've ever seen? That hot color is all natural, courtesy of a couple of teaspoons of juice from tunas, the fruits of a native prickly pear cactus.

My paternal grandmother made jams, jellies, and preserves from such wild Texas fruits as prickly pears, mustang grapes (Vitis mustangensis), algerita berries (Mahonia haematocarpa), and wild plums. Lacking the forethought to learn her recipes before she died, I was forced to develop my own prickly pear protocol by trial and error.

I got off to a rocky start with the fruits of Opuntia phaeacantha, which are only red on the outside; the resulting jelly tasted okay but was far from the visual treat I remembered. The proper species, Opuntia engelmannii, produced a gorgeous magenta juice, but I learned the hard way that the pigment is heat sensitive. The fruits are naturally low in the pectin that produces jelly, and cooking the syrup a little longer to compensate can result in a sudden, dramatic loss of color.

Getting a product with good body and good color may take double or triple the pectin you'd add to apple or grape juice plus extra sugar, so prickly pear jelly can get a little pricey. Fortunately, prickly pear syrup is just as tasty and even more versatile. Its delicate flavor and intense color make a lovely addition to pancakes, waffles, ice cream, cheesecake, fruit salads, and even in Tequila Sunrises in place of grenadine (which usually contains artificial coloring).

Unsweetened prickly pear juice can be combined with another native American fruit for a desert twist on a traditional holiday condiment. If you have access to plump, juicy prickly pear fruits and don't mind taking a little food out of the mouths of thrashers, quail, javelinas, and even butterflies such as the Viceroy at right, collect a few and try this recipe:

Cranberry-Tuna Sauce

1 c. tuna (prickly pear fruit) juice
10-12 oz. ripe cranberries
1 c. white sugar

Harvest 5 to 10 medium to large tunas. Salad tongs are useful for removing them from the plant, as you do NOT want to get the nasty little glochids in your skin. Wash the fruits thoroughly to remove dust and as many of the glochids as possible (a vegetable brush will help, though I once used the rinse setting at a manual car wash); trimming off the round blossom scar is optional. Place in a glass or enamel pan, cover just to the tops of the fruits with water, bring to a boil, then drop the heat and simmer for 5-7 minutes or until the water is deeply colored. Allow the fruits and water to cool, then either 1) mash with a potato masher or 2) pulse in a food processor until the larger chunks disappear. Strain juice and pulp through 3-4 layers of cheesecloth, squeezing the pulp gently to extract as much of the tuna goodness as possible without letting any stray glochids through.

Open a 12-ounce bag of cranberries, rinse in cold water, and put any underripe (white) berries aside for the birds. Combine berries in a glass or enamel saucepan with 1 cup extracted tuna juice and 1 cup white sugar (if you reduce the sugar or use a substitute, you may need to add a thickening agent to get a firm gel). Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. (If necessary, use a heat diffuser or place saucepan inside a heavy skillet to avoid hot spots that can cause carmelization.) Serve hot or cold with meats or meat substitutes or just eat it all by itself when no one's looking.

Use leftover juice to flavor and color lemonade, tea, gelatin, or homemade sorbet or gelato. --SW

Happy Halloween!

Woo hoo! It's Bisbee's favorite holiday, when it's hard to tell who's in costume and who's just wearing their street clothes.

We missed celebrating Halloween last year because I was in Cape May, but we're going out tonight in a couple of our favorite costumes (right): The Horned Lizard King and Ambassador Krkktt. This photo is from these characters' inaugural year, 2001; I'll try to get a back photo of Tom's costume tonight to post as an addendum, because it rocks.

We each made our own mask in a workshop put on by a local art gallery. First we formed the basic shape in earthen clay then covered the form with plastic wrap and applied layer upon layer of cotton batting soaked in watered-down glue. After several days of drying, we painted them and added additional touches (dimensional fabric paint works great).

It's been several years since we've been that inspired, but on past Halloweens Tom's been the World's Largest Montezuma Quail (left), a Great Gray Owl, a Javelina, a gorilla tourist in Bermuda shorts and bucket hat, a musical spider (he played The Ballad of Spider John by Willis Allan Ramsey at the now defunct Quarter Moon Coffeehouse), and Tim the Enchanter (he won a costume contest with that one).

I've been a Druid priestess, green elf, and Mother Earth, but the last few years I've been bouncing back and forth between the frog alien pictured above and a Dia de los Muertos catrina, with skull makeup and a big black hat wreathed in red roses (very Dead). One year, a guy came up to me in the Stock Exchange Bar and said, "Your makeup's really realistic and I should know...I've seen a lot of skulls." (Uh, thank you kind sir?) In keeping with my costume, I abandoned my usual karaoke alter ego, Roberta Shrub, for "Güera Calavera" (roughly, "Blondie Skull").

So we're recycling costumes again this year, but maybe the spectacle of our Bisbee neighbors all decked out in their wonderfully creative finery will get us charged up for next Halloween.