For the past two weeks our CSA share from the Gildrien Farm has included several cups of dried black beans, a food I’ve eaten many times but never really cooked with. In their weekly letter Jeremy and Caitlin helpfully included a recipe for Puerto Rican Black Beans, a tasty-sounding launching pad for the evening’s dinner.

Since I didn’t have any bacon grease on hand I figured I would just fry up several large pieces of bacon and use both the meat and the grease. I had planned to make a fritata as the main course for the evening, but after sampling the beans, decided to add some more veggies and put them on bread as our main course. Unfortunately, the result was so delicious that the crostini never made it out of the kitchen for a photo shoot.

Black Bean Crostini

• 1 cup dry black beans, soaked overnight
• 1 large onion, diced as small as possible
• 1/2 a red pepper, diced
• 1/4 lb of bacon (4-5 pieces)
• 1 cup of cherry tomatoes, quartered
• salt
• 1 baguette

1. Soak the beans overnight to soften, then simmer over medium heat for 45 minutes until tender.
2. While the beans are cooking, fry the bacon in a skillet over medium heat until it is crispy and most of the fat has melted off. Pull the bacon strips out of the pan and let cool, trying to keep as much of the grease in the skillet as possible.
3. Turn down the heat on the skillet to low. Add the diced onion and some salt to the bacon grease in the skillet and cook for 15 minutes, slowly letting the onion turn clear and caramelize.
4. Drain the majority of the water from the beans (leaving about a half cup) and add the beans and their water to the skillet with the onion and bacon grease. Stir together with the red pepper. Raise the heat to medium and stew for another 15 minutes or so, until the beans begin to fall apart.
5. Mash the beans in the skillet with a utensil of some sort until you have chunky bean paste interspersed with red-pepper and bean husks. Crumble the bacon and stir it into the beans. Salt to taste.
6. Cut the baguette into thin slices. Pile a large dollop of beans on each slice and top with diced cherry tomatoes.

My current woodworking project is a Mission-style bookshelf that I designed to match the sofa table that I built last year. The bookshelf will sit below a window to the kitchen, so it is low and extra wide to fit that space. To support the weight of the books without sagging, sets of stiles transfers weight from the middle shelf to the frame above and below.

I am building the bookshelf out of cherry. Like the sofa table, all joinery is mortise and tenon. This time I am squaring out the mortises with a new set of mortising chisels rather than rounding off the tenons with a knife as I did on the sofa table — which is making the process go much faster.

If you like the design and wish to build one for yourself, you can download my SketchUp model as a starting point.

Above Bittersweet Falls, the Beaver Brook cuts a deep ravine through layers of black slate. The gorge can be difficult to traverse without getting one’s feet wet, but is filled with cascades and mossy bottoms ringed by ferns and overshadowed by hemlocks.

I headed out the door today planing to swing by Bittersweet Falls for a few quick shots before driving out to the Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area where stargazer05756 has been following the migration of snow geese. I never made it to Dead Creek. After taking a few shots below the falls I climbed up above and noticed an impressive gorge winding upstream. Ever since I was a child I have always loved exploring up cascading streams. There is just something magical above clambering around a rock to find another waterfall or quiet pool surrounded by moss, ferns, hemlocks — and in the south, rhododendrons.

The Beaver Brook didn’t disappoint and while its steep slate side posed a challenge, I hiked about a third of a mile upstream along the stream bed before scaling the hillside and quickly walking back to the car from above.

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The Northeast Waterfalls site has directions and more info.

Over the course of the past year I built this cherry sofa table based on a design by Scott Gibson in Fine Woodworking’s "Furniture" book.

All frame joinery is mortise and tenon, while the drawers use doweled rabbit joints. The finish is boiled linseed oil topped with 3 coats of Minwax wiping varnish.

Building this table was quite a learning experience as just about every part required techniques that I hadn’t used before. Mortise and tenon joinery, biscuits to align the table top during glue-up, doweled joints fort the drawers, quartersawn veneers for the legs, breadboard-ends, and varnish; all of these were new to me and required a bit of trial and error to get right.

This project certainly had its share of "oops" moments, but nothing that couldn’t be repaired or worked-around. I cut the bottom shelf stretcher one inch too short, but was able to cut it in half and splice in a section with a small mortise and tenon in the middle. Later, I made the hipped-tenons on which the breadboard-ends of the top sit too thin. This was repaired with the addition of some 5-minute epoxy to thicken the tenon.

All that remains now is to choose and install drawer-pull hardware.

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See Sarah’s “Project 365″ on Flickr.

The cooker worked great and the chicken melted off of the bone.

The commuter bike, a Giant “Tran Send”, has received some accoutrements over the course of the year: storage, improved lights, and winter rubber.

The panniers I had purchased in April ended up being returned since they were too small to fit my laptop and gi. In their stead was a plastic crate lashed to the rack with zip-ties. The crate wobbled a bit when piled high, but sufficed for most of the summer until I had the chance to augment it with some old panniers that had been stored in my parents garage since a Boyscout bike-hike many years ago. The old panniers didn’t fit the laptop either, so to fit both them and the crate I fashioned a wooden riser-platform to allow the crate to sit a few inches off the rack. While difficult to attach, this arrangement has the benefit of enhancing that stability of the crate as well as providing as much storage as I care to fill.

The second upgrade was the addition of several more blinking tail lights and the CygoLight Mity-Cross headlight that I had purchased for the 24 Hours of Great Glen mountain bike race. A reflective vest also joins the lights for what I’m hoping will provoke a reaction along the lines of, “Is that a Christmas tree ahead?”.

Last week brought the latest update, studded snow tires. I purchased the Schwalbe “Marathon Winter” tires from Peter White Cycles in New Hampshire (mail order), with 240 tungsten-carbide studs in each tire. At this point they’ve only seen a bit of snow and ice, but they remove the hesitation I built up after a tense, snowy commute with my slick summer tires.

Now that winter seems to have started for real, my plan is to bike as much as I feel comfortable with and car-pool with Sarah or take the bus if the weather is bad. I’d like to push myself a bit to continue through the winter, but would rather not take any risks of being hit by drivers who might be sliding around the highway in a storm.

The blue line is our GPS track, the purple are the trails (provided by LocalMotion.com).

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It was a bit damp and cloudy, but the trails weren’t too muddy the woods were beautiful. A fine time was had by all (especially Hudson, the pooch).

The goal of the race is for a team to ride as many 8-mile laps as they can in 24 hours with everyone doing at least one lap at night (with high-powered helmet and/or bar mounted headlights). Teams are grouped in ‘classes’ based on the size of team (1, 2, 4, or 5 members) and by skill (pro, expert, sport, beginner). There were just two skill-levels for 5-person teams: “Open” and “Cruiser”. There was some confusion in registering and we ended up in the “Open” category instead of the more appropriate “Cruiser” category, so we got crushed in standings. We had a great time anyway though and ended up coming in in 55th place over all out of 156 teams.

The race had a pretty neat computerized timing system going which allowed us to instantly see our times and standings after finishing a lap. According to our results, we completed 22 laps, covered 182.6 miles, and climbed 26,070 feet. Of that, I rode 6 laps, covering 49.8 miles, and climbing 7,110 feet.

Photos by Sarah:

We had a great time both riding and just hanging out. Since only one person was riding at a time, we usually had 5 or 6 people in camp hanging out in camp by the fire. This was my first 24-hour race and I wasn’t really sure what to expect both with sleepiness and night-time riding difficulty. To deal with the latter, I ended up buying a headlight for my handlebars and borrowed one of Eli’s LED flashlights for my helmet.

This combo of lights worked amazingly well. The wide flood of the handlebar-mounted MityCross providing nice shadows for depth perception, while the spot-beam of the flashlight lit up the trail up to a hundred yards ahead. While some of the pits of mud were still dark, I was able to ride my night laps at full speed – I even maxed out my gearing on one of the carriage-road downhill sections.

Overall, I was pretty exhausted by Sunday afternoon, but waking up in the middle of the night to ride wasn’t so bad. Getting a lot of QT with great friends made the whole thing a blast. I can’t wait until next year!

Here are a few videos from Sarah to finish things off:

Start of the race, part 1:

Start of the race, part 2:

Me riding “The Birches” section:

I mostly rode with the light on my helmet and battery in my CamelBack which worked great on all of the trails from super-twisty handle-bar-wide singletrack to wider double-track. I certainly had plenty of light to see and I was pleasently reminded of mogul-skiing advise: Stop looking at your feet, observe strategically. Lifting my head a bit and looking 15-20 feet down the trail (on single-track) rather than at my feet helped my speed pick up measurably. There were a couple of time while I was exploring some new single-track that I came around a large tree in a hairpin-turn to be surprised by a drop or climb that I wasn’t expecting, but I don’t think more light would have helped shine through an obstacle.

I tried one short stretch of double-track with the light on my bars and found that while the the depth-perceptions is much better (as everyone says), it was really distracting to have the light twitching back and forth as I dodged rocks. With the light on the bars I was able to cleanly bunny-hop a series of 3, 6, and 8-inch logs, whereas with the light on my head I miss-judged the big one and clipped it in the air with my tires — praise-be to 6″ of suspension travel.

Overall the MityCross 350 is plenty of light to get out into the woods and ride after dark. More light would always be nice, but I had a great hour and a half ride with just this light. My plan is to get a high-powered LED flashlight to complement this light and provide depth-perception on the handlebars, but the MityCross was more than enough to get started.

On my ride home after leaving the woods I tested the “throw” of the light by riding down my dark road as fast as I could. I found that the beam of the MittyCross allowed me to resolve details about 100ft (30yards/meters) ahead which made me comfortable riding up to ~20-25mph. Beyond that, the road seemed kind of dim and fuzzy and I had to really strain to see further. While adequate for a leisurely road ride (or as fast as I can get the mountain bike), I wouldn’t want to bomb down a hill at 50mph with only this light.

(Note: cross-posed at MTBR.com)