3 min

Notes - Sat, May 3, 2014

Shopping, house cleaning, beer bottling, beer sampling, pizza making and eating, bird watching, and dining at Blackberry Corners. A busy but fun day.

Early in the morning, I shopped at The Andersons on Talmadge.

Pizza

After shopping, I assembled a pizza dough. My pizza threads:

I incorporated spelt flour into the dough recipe by milling spelt berries in our Vitamix. I bought the spelt berries at the Phoenix Earth Food Co-op, which is one of my favorite local stores. The addition of the spelt flour adds great flavor to the crust.

I baked the pizza during our afternoon beer bottling process. On the pizza, I used chevre goat cheese made by local farm Turkey Foot Creek that we bought at the co-op, crimini mushrooms also from the co-op, DD's pasta/pizza sauce made and canned last year, olive oil from the Toledo Meat Market, and coarse red Hawaiian sea salt that we received as a gift from DD's sister.

Weather

From my Field Notes notebook:

11:50 a.m. Nice weather today. Mostly Cloudy to cloudy, breezy, temps 55 to 60 degrees. Perfect for me. May has always been my favorite weather month for running, cycling, fishing, birdwatching, and storm watching.

Bottling Beer

DD and I spent the morning house cleaning and readying our beer brewing equipment, including another cleaning of empty bottles.

Today we bottled our first home brew beer, which we brewed on Sun, Mar 30. So we bottled one day before a five-week fermentation. We could have bottled after four weeks.

Local home brewing guru JP came to our house around 12:30 - 1:00 p.m. to help us bottle.

DD filled the bottles, and I capped them.

JP left after 4:00 p.m. He brought a handy gadget that quickly allowed for me to sanitize the bottles.

During our bottling efforts, we sampled multiple beers that I bought in the morning from The Andersons. Curmudgeon Old Ale by Founders was my favorite. I also liked the Witbier made by Rockmill Brewery, located in southern Ohio.

After JP left and since we had the bottling equipment out and cleaned, we bottled our first one-gallon batch of beer, which was the recipe included in the one-gallon hardware brewing kit that we purchased from NorthernBrewer.com.

The beer was an Irish Red Ale that we brewed on Mon evening, Apr 21, 2014. It required a two-week fermentation, so we were a couple days shy of that, but it should be okay.

This one-gallon batch produced seven bottles of beer. When we brewed it, we should have added a bit more water to bring the amount up to the one-gallon mark.

Birdwatching

At 5:15 p.m., we arrived at Magee Marsh Wildlife Area.

We parked at and entered the east entrance of the boardwalk. Birds that we observed:

  • NOWA
  • WPWA
  • MYWA
  • YWAR
  • LISP
  • NAWA
  • BGGN
  • WAVI
  • FISP
  • WTSP
  • BAWW
  • COYE
  • GRCA
  • BTNW
  • GRHE - Green Heron
  • HETH
  • RCKI
  • TRUS - Trumpeter Swan
  • BCCH
  • LEFL
  • PUMA

The Field Sparrow was an interesting sighting, in my opinion. It foraged on damp ground under a dense area of button bushes on the interior side of the boardwalk not far from the east entrance. It seemed like an odd location for a FISP on May 3.

On the boardwalk, we met "old" friends that we had not seen in a couple years because I only visited the boardwalk one time in May 2013 when Mom and Dad stopped up to go birdwatching.

After birdwatching, DD and I stopped at Blackberry Corners for dinner. I ordered a 1/4-pound cheeseburger with cheddar cheese and nothing else and fries. Standard bar food for me. I also ordered an iced tea and some Jim Beam bourbon.

We ordered pie to take home. I got the Oreo pie, and DD ordered the peanut butter pie.

We arrived home at dusk. It was a full rich day.

#toledo - #business - #shopping - #beer - #bird - #food - #pizza - #blog_jr

By JR - 660 words
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