October 2007

Yesterday I worked for the Raleigh Jaycees Turkey Shoot at the North Carolina State Fair.

For $3.00 a shot you can shoot a real 20 gauge shotgun, together with 11 other contestants. And no, it's not about shooting real turkeys: the targets are pieces of paper. The person who shot a pellet closest to the cross hairs wins a frozen turkey.

The Jaycee group in Raleigh has been organizing this game since 1952 at the State Fair, and it's a major fund raiser. Some people come back every year to win their Thanksgiving turkey at the fair.

I was at the Fair at 5.00 pm, and we closed the game at 11.00 pm. In my dinner break I went to get some fair food, a big roasted turkey leg of course. It was great fun to do, people really enjoyed the shooting and it was a nice group of people to work with.

The Jaycees website has a slideshow with some older pictures.

I felt like cooking something special tonight and I made a pizza.

I used a different recipe than usual: I used whole wheat flour for the pizza's dough. I could say that this is more healthy and that's why I choose it, but the reality is that the regular flour we had was expired.

Whole wheat flour is great for a pizza! It makes a delicious and strong crust. I baked the crust without topping for 5 minutes on 500 degrees before baking the whole pizza on 425 degrees, and it turned out to be crispy and just right.

A next time I should buy a different meat. I wasn't quite satisfied with the Genoa salami I used tonight: not enough spices and not tasty enough. The sauce worked out quite well, I made a light tomato sauce with a bit of garlic and fresh oregano.

Today I went with for a wine tasting tour in North Carolina. We were five people and drove in one car, a big truck, from Chapel Hill to the area around Burlington, which is between Durham and Greensboro. The Haw River Wine Trail is a tour along a different wineries in rural North Carolina.

Over the course of the afternoon we went to four different wineries, and we had a great time. There are some quite drinkable North Carolina wines out there. It was inspiring to see how on a small scale products like these wines are being made. In one of the wineries the owner told us how she and her husband decided to switch to growing grapes in 2001 after having grown tobacco for years.

I bought two bottles, both sweet white wines. One nice blend from the Grove winery made of grapes from along the Eno River near our house, and the other is a delicious (sweet) white wine.

A small grape field near the first winery.

A winery's inside.

The fourth winery.

Easy life.

Two North Carolinian wines. At two of the wineries I received a wine glass.

Saturday morning Jaap, Mieke and I went shopping in Wieringerwerf and Middenmeer. We got some really delicious Dutch cheese from the market, and Jaap and I bought some extra memory for our server. I installed it later and the server now has 1 GB of fairly fast RAM (before it had 512MB).

Ettie and Gerben came to Middenmeer also, and we had nice chats. In the afternoon I went to see Bianca and Patricia, and when I came back with had coffee with home-made Dutch apple pie -- delicious!

In the late afternoon the guests started arriving; many of my friends came over to Middenmeer and we had a great time together. We went to bed really late, and the alarm went off at 5.00 am to leave for the airport. Rob joined us and at 7.00 am we arrived at Schiphol.

Home-made appeltaart, Dutch apple pie.

My cousin Paula is in Jaipur, India now, where she'll be staying for about four months.

She has a website where she writes about her adventures in her typical up-beat style. I met her at Amsterdam Centraal Station last week, when she was getting ready for the final preparations and a shopping day in Maastricht.

The weather is much better than in Oslo where she stayed last year around this time.