Naan bread

We've been experimenting with naan bread.

It's an Indian/Paki leavened flat bread.

Here is a pretty good recipe:

Naan: Indian oven-baked flat bread

We substitute honey for sugar; in this recipe we use three tablespoons of honey.

We use Greek Gods honey yogurt, or honey-vanilla yogurt. While low-fat yogurt works, do not use no-fat yogurt.

The dough will be very sticky. I pour a couple of teaspoons of olive oil into my hands and rub it around like a lotion. This helps keep the dough from becoming unmanageable while kneading and other handling.

After I'm done kneading the dough, I pick it all up out of the bowl while Leece scrapes the bowl clean. She then wipes the bowl with olive oil, and I put the dough back in.

We let the dough rise for about 90 minutes, then punch it down and let it rise for another hour. This punch down is not necessary, but we found that several punchdowns and rises over the space of several hours really improves the flavor of our focaccias and ciabattas. We tried it with the naan and found it works there, too.

When rolling out, I don't use a pin. I just work it flat with the heel of my hand.

We tried baking it in a cast iron skillet on a gas ring. We found that we couldn't get the flame low enough to keep from overheating the pan. As it turns out, the 3.5 to 4 setting on one of the electric range's large burners heats the pan very nicely. Make sure the pan is up to temp before the first naan goes in. We wipe the pan with a paper napkin soaked in olive oil. When the oil begins to smoke slightly, that's your cue.

Use a cast iron skillet or even a cast iron Dutch oven if at all possible.

This is some good stuff. A double recipe will not see us through the week.

Bent's Old Fort: 2015 Fur Trade Symposium

This past Saturday, we went out to Bent's Old Fort for the last day of the 2015 Fur Trade Symposium.

Some of the finest and most knowledgeable living history interpreters for the period were invited to attend. The time period was around 1842, when the fur trade was moving away from beaver, to buffalo.

We got some pretty good shots of some of them:

with more over on WritingPlaces.com:

Bent's Old Fort and the 2015 Fur Trade Symposium gallery.

Mueller State Park ...

Here are some shots of Mueller State Park. Though we have hiked other trails in the area, and have passed by Mueller many times, this was the first time we actually spent time in the park.

It's really quite nice, nicely maintained and laid out with a seemingly endlessly entwined network of trails.

Here are some shots:

Florissant ...

We went up to the Divide area for the Labor Day holiday.

We hiked in Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument on one day. Though most of the wildflowers have gone to seed this late in the season, there was a surprising number of 'em still in a photogenic state.

Indian Paintbrush

Colorado Aster

Leece and Steve-O on the Hornbeck trail

And us, of course

Leece and Steve-O try to identify these flowers near the fork to the Hornbeck Homestead

Prowers Bridge

We stopped at the Prowers Bridge, a series of truss spans over the Arkansas River in eastern Bent County.

The bridge was constructed around 1902. It has three camelback trusses, two Pratt through-trusses, and one Pratt pony truss.

This reference, Bridge Basics,describes those trusses in detail.

The bridge has been closed to traffic for years. There is a new bridge a few yards to the west of it. Take either CR 34 or CR 35 south from US 50 to CR JJ, then either right or left, depending on which road you took from US 50, to CR 34.5. You can see the bridge from either intersection with JJ.

Here are some photos, taken during our road trip of July 11:

High Plains Summer: Lincoln County, Colorado

This weekend, we went up to DIA to pick up SteveO, who was returning from his visit with grandfolks in Phoenix.

On the way back, we stopped off I-70's exit 348 (CO 134) for some photos of the high plains. Lincoln County is usually lushly green in comparison to southeastern Colorado, even with all the rain we've received in the southeast. As you can see from the photos below, it is.

CO 134, looking southwest toward Pikes Peak, some 80 miles distant. The haze is blocking the view of the mountain, which is often sharply detailed despite the distance.

Leece setting up for some photos.

Bull thistle.

Leece shoots the thistles.

Amber waves of grain, off CO 71, south of Limon.

South Rush Creek, from Lincoln County Road 2d.

Lincoln County Road 2d, looking to the east.

Crested Prickly Poppy, off CR 2d.

British Cemetery, Ocracoke Island

There is a British cemetery in the village of Ocracoke. It's off the main road, but it's easy enough to find.

Here are some photos:

Four members of the crew of HMS Bedfordshire are buried here. Bedfordshire was an armed trawler, operating out of Morehead City on antisubmarine duty.  Her captain was Lieutenant Russell Bransby Davis, RNR. On May 12, 1942, she was torpedoed by U -558, and lost with all 34 (some sources show 37) of her crew. The four crewmen buried here washed up from the sea on Ocracoke over the next few days. A fifth was found on Hatteras Island and is buried there next to a British sailor from the merchant ship San Delfino, torpedoed a year earlier.

The British cemetery here is maintained by the US Coast Guard; the one on Hatteras is maintained by the National Park Service.

U-558 was a Type VIIC boat, skippered by Kapitänleutnant Günther Krech. A little more than a year after U-558 and Krech sank Bedfordshire, U-558 was sunk in the Bay of Biscay on July 20, 1943. Krech and four of his crew survived the sinking - they were either on the bridge or part of the gun crew - and were captured. Krech died in 2000.