The Answers!

Thank you all for waiting patiently for explanations of the photos. Here are a few corresponding pictures that will help clear things up.


The first picture was of porcupine quills that we pulled out of this unfortunate canine. :(
We pulled over 50 quills out of her. The poor dog doesn't look like she's having fun.


The Wilson's well couldn't handle the load of eleven extra people, so we went to the river almost every night to wash our hair. It was actually pretty fun!


While we were in Idaho freeloading off the Wilson's, we decided to make ourselves useful for a change; so we painted their garage. While I was spraying the eaves I got a cool free powder job. :)

Thats all for now. I am still working on loading the pictures to a web album.

-Caleb

We're Alive!

Hey Ya'll. Believe it or not, the Fornari's are STILL ALIVE! Yeah, you heard that right. We really are alive and doing well. We've just been extremely busy the last few months.

Just to clear things up, we have no intentions of abandoning this blog and we will try to post more often from now on. Right now we are working on a very long picture post of our Idaho and Montana summer vacation.

Here are a few teasers. Keep checking back for the real deal.


100 points for the first person who guesses what these are.


What are they doing?


No that IS NOT makeup!

Explanations to follow :)

I will be uploading all 1000+ vacation pics to a web album soon. I will post the link when I do.

-Caleb

Our second week at the farmers market

We got up at 5:45 this morning and headed over to a local restaurants kitchen to bake breads, muffins, cinnamon rolls, lemon squares and butter-crunch.
As the official driver, I ended up driving back and forth from the house to the restaurant about five times in three hours. Fortunately the restaurant is only half a mile from our house. I would have ended up tripping over everything, and being tripped over in the kitchen anyway, so it worked out well.

Cody, being more of the culinary type than I am, whipped up a special brew of sun dried tomatoes, basil pesto and cream cheese, packed it into small round containers, and sold them for $4.00 each.

Kristen and Michaela baked four types of bread, three types of muffins, butter crunch, lemon squares and cinnamon rolls. They also prepared jam and lemon curd in advance.

After all the baking was finished we drove to downtown Hollister, where they hold the farmers market every Wednesday from 2:00 to 7:00 in the afternoon.

We got off to a fast start right away, but were soon stopped by the health inspector who wasn't happy with the way we were serving samples. Apparently the samples are supposed to be covered at all times. :(
This messed up our entire sales strategy, as most of our customers bought only after tasting a sample.

We ended up holding trays of our products out in the isles and shouting to everyone who would listen. Surprisingly this was more effective than the samples had been, and we almost sold out by the end of the day, as evidenced in the video. We will probably use a combination of shouting and covered sample containers from now on.











-Caleb

Isaac in the newspaper!

This past Wednesday was the first day of the Hollister farmers market. We have a booth there this year selling baked goods, jams, candies and bath and body products. We had a lot of fun, and sold a lot. While Isaac was handing out samples of our baked goods, a newspaper reporter took about 100 photo's of him. Sure enough the next morning, he was in the local newspaper! Way to go Isaac!!! To see the article and photo's click Here. The photo of Isaac is at the bottom of the page.
We are planning to take more photo's of our booth and give a more in depth report next week, so keep checking back!

-Kristen

Berry Madness

Several times a year our family visits a berry farm called Gizdich Ranch. Gizdich ranch is a family run U-Pick farm, located in the Watsonville valley, that grows about 6 types of berries. We usually visit each year when the strawberries, blackberries and raspberries first get ripe.


Last week the strawberries were ripe, so most of the family headed to Gizdich to pick 20 pounds of strawberries. We ate some of them and made jam out of the rest. Perhaps I will get Kristen to post about the jam making process.


Unfortunately I was working, so I wasn't able to go with them this year. But I enjoyed looking at the pictures they took and thought others might also, so I am posting some of them here.






-Caleb

The Annual Snake Round Up

Every year in late April the gopher snakes in Hollister wake up from their winter hibernation and come above ground looking for food. I have always had a soft spot for snakes. When we were younger, Cody and I looked forward to this season. We would catch the snakes and keep them as "pets".

Today we caught the first snake of the year. We don't keep them as pets anymore, but we still enjoy the challenge of catching them without getting bitten. The first snake this year was a fairly small specimen and as an added bonus, it was missing it's tail. The tail was probably chopped off by a tractor towing a deep cultivator.

In our younger days we would have put it in a terrarium and tamed it.

Taming a snake is actually very easy. It just requires a lot of patience. We used to spend hours holding the snakes head until it finally got used to us. Once we tamed them they would never even think of biting us. If we handed them to someone else though, they would get very agitated and in one case, a snake actually bit a friend who it was not familiar with.

Snakes are much smarter than is commonly
believed and have highly developed qualities of recognition. Many of the snakes on our
property have unique scars that we recognize them with. All of our previously tamed snakes
are still very friendly when we catch them, and we can hold them without any risk of
getting bitten just a few minutes after we catch them each year.

The largest snake we ever caught was 5' 7" long. At that time I was only 5' 5" tall, so it was quite a challenge to tame it. It eventually became one of our friendliest snakes and we caught it regularly for many years after.

Mom was always very tolerant of our snake catching, even when they escaped in the house (a not infrequent occurrence). We actually kept a terrarium with 5 snakes in it, in the house for several months. The lid was broken and sometimes they would escape and be loose for days. We always caught them in the end though and no one ever got bitten. I have only been bitten once when I was very young and didn't know how to catch them properly.

We also have a pet ball python, but thats a story for another post.

-Caleb

The Death Of Tea?

I've been an unofficial amateur connoisseur of tea for as long as I can remember. It must be because I am half British, and may also have been fueled by my strong dislike for coffee.

Eclipsed perhaps only by wine, tea has one of the oldest and richest histories of any drink. Tea figures prominently in ancient Chinese medicine and folklore and is believed to have originated in China around 1000 BC. The taxation of tea was a major factor in --and is claimed by some to have actually been responsible for-- the Revolutionary War. Who hasn't heard of the Boston Tea Party?

Unfortunately teas popularity has steadily declined over the last 300 years until it has actually become a fairly rare drink in many countries. It wasn't always like that and still isn't in a few countries, especially England, China and Japan.
England's whole society used to revolve around afternoon tea, and still does to some extent.

The United States on the other hand has completely dropped tea from the list of common drinks. Very few restaurants offer it and almost none advertise it. Tea is almost unheard of in most American homes. The corporate scene hasn't been quite so quick to drop it; Tea can still be found in many offices beside the coffee dispenser.

Tea recently experienced a slight revival in the health minded community because of it's antioxidant qualities, but it is destined to be short lived as it has already lost most of it's momentum, and is slipping back into oblivion.

Perhaps the reason for the decline in tea drinking is that it is time consuming to make, especially if you make it properly. People don't have time to boil water, pour it over the tea bag, and wait three minutes for it to steep anymore. These are the days of Starbucks and instant coffee (although incidentally Starbucks does sell tea). Tea also contains less caffeine than coffee, a very important factor for modern Starbucks addicts.

I have no idea why I decided to write about tea tonight. Perhaps the excellent cup of Jasmine White Tea I just enjoyed inspired me. :)

If you want to learn more, Wikipedia has a fairly comprehensive --and somewhat fragmented-- overview Here.

-Caleb

UC Davis Picnic Day

Every year on the second Saturday in April UC Davis holds a Picnic Day. Picnic Day is a sort of open house with arts, crafts, science, technology, and agricultural exhibits.
This was the first year we attended and of course it rained all day. :-(
That didn't stop us from having a great time though, especially since most of the exhibits were indoors.

Our first stop was the Agriculture exhibit. They had a really neat exhibit showing the life cycle of sturgeon, and even had some young sturgeon in a tank. I'm still not exactly sure what sturgeon have to do with Agriculture, but they were in the Agriculture building.
There was also an exhibit that taught how to isolate DNA from split peas using simple household ingredients like soap, meat tenderizer and rubbing alcohol. 
Are you getting the feeling that these were no ordinary farmers?
Of course they also had cow and goat milking and a petting zoo, but for some reason that just wasn't as much of a hit in our family. :-)

Next we visited the avian building, where they had baby chicks and quail hatching in incubators.
In the same building, they were giving out free popcorn and cotton candy, which was a huge hit with the kids.
They also were giving out packages of 300 live lady bugs. We are now the proud owners of 1000+ of these little critters, which are currently crawling around our garden.

Toyota was an official sponsor of the event, so of course they were giving rides in their new
fuel cell powered SUV prototypes.
I was surprised how practical these cars turned out to be. They had plenty of power and actually looked the same on the 
outside as the regular 2007 SUV's. 
Now if I could only scrape together 1.5 million to buy one. I have a feeling I will be driving the gas powered, carbon emitting type until the price comes down a bit.  

The arts and crafts building had a very neat exhibit that taught the 
little ones how to build a pyramid out of gumdrops and tooth picks.  
They also had pottery, glass blowing, woodworking, knitting, spinning and painting demonstrations.
My favorite though, was the sushi dish painting activity. 
Every one  in the family got to paint their own sushi dish. 
We ended up with some really creative looking sushi dishes.

Below are a few photos. Some of them are blurry, and we didn't get very many because of the rain. If you want to see the entire album Click Here.










Everything was free and it seemed to be a very community 
centered event with a minimum of commercial advertising. 
We will definitely be back next year.

-Caleb and Kristen   

Beach Photos

This is upload attempt number twenty. I have been having a LOT of trouble uploading pictures to the blog. Picasa Web Albums tries to manage the uploads, but when I use it the pictures just appear as blank boxes.

I am trying the direct upload feature from Picasa. If you don't see photos below it means that this didn't work either.

Thanks for your patience while I have been sorting this out.

-Caleb

Update: This was supposed to have 9 pictures, not 4. I give up. If anyone wants to see all the beach photos that we took on that trip (Warning: if you have a slow internet connection this might be a bad idea, because there's over 90 pics) Click Here

 

 

 

 

Cinnamon Roll Recipe (as good as Cinnabon!)

Michaela and I are planning on selling baked goods, jams and handmade soaps at our local farmers market this Summer. We were in search of a REALLY yummy cinnamon roll recipe. You know, the melt in your mouth, super sweet and gooey, keep people coming back for more kind? Well, we've found it! This is supposed to be the original Cinnabon recipe. I'm not sure if that's true, but these are very close!

Rolls:
1¼ oz. pkg. Yeast
1 c. warm milk
½ c. granulated sugar
1/3 c. melted butter
1 t. salt
2 eggs
4 c. all-purpose flour

Filling:
1 c. packed brown sugar
2 1/2 TBS. cinnamon
1/2 c. butter

Icing:
1/2 C. butter, softened
1½ c. confectioners sugar
¼ c. (2 oz.) cream cheese
½ t. real vanilla extract
1/8 t. salt

Rolls: Oven to 400° F.
(1) Dissolve yeast in milk.
(2) Mix in sugar, butter, salt, eggs, flour. Mix well.
(3) Turn dough out onto lightly floured surface. Knead into a large ball. Cover; let rise 1 hour.
(4) Roll dough into a 21" x 16" wide rectangle. Spread the softened butter all over, then sprinkle with the sugar and cinnamon
(5) Roll from long-side to short-side. Pinch the ends.
(6) Using very sharp knife cut into 10 rolls. (These are really big. you can cut them smaller if you want)
(6) Grease your preferred baking pan (I like mine to be all squished up next to the other)- I generally use an 11"x 15" pan. Place rolls in pan and let rise for 30 minutes.
(8) Bake until the rolls are slightly browned and not doughy, about 10-12 min. This will vary according to your oven. Just don't over bake.
(9) When done, spread them with the icing.
(10) Enjoy!

Icing instructions:
Cream all ingredients together with an electric mixer. Beat for at least 2 min. on med-high speed to get that nice, whipped icing like Cinnabon serves.

These are best enjoyed warm, but they are also good the next day. We pop them in the microwave for 10-15 sec. each.