Month: September 2012

Hiking the Karlsruher Grat

September 30, 2012 — No Comments ↓

Next to the village of Ottenhöfen starts the trail towards the Karlsruher Grat in the Black Forest. The surrounding peaks were still covered in mist when we approached the trail head right next to a stone pit. Luckily, it cleared up pretty much for the day once we started the hike. The trail ascents at Edelfrauengrab alongside a little creek with plenty of beautiful waterfalls. Shortly before the ridge, a self-service bar has been set up with a wide variety of local Schnapps. Being on the way up, we resisted the temptations of specialties such as Topinambur- and Blutwurzschnapps and…

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Mushroom hunting!

September 12, 2012 — No Comments ↓

Today I went mushroom hunting. I was riding my bike to the forests around Berlin to enjoy one of the last summer days when i noticed that i was already quite close to a chanterelle spot! However, it was pretty obvious that somebody else has been there shortly before me – there were some traces of picked and left mushrooms and, unfortunately, hardly any chanterelles. I looked very careful, and found a total of 7! Here are all of them. Luckily, i also found 2 rather large Birkenpilze (birch boletus), so it was at least enough to add some mushroom…

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Half Dome hike

September 11, 2012 — No Comments ↓

Around 3am at the 4th of July, we woke up, packed our tent and drove from Summerdale Campground to the trail head for the Half Dome hike. The hike is about 22.7km with a 1,600m gain in elevation! So we had to start quite early. When we arrived at 4:30am, there was still plenty of space for parking and in the bear boxes. After stuffing our food away, we joined the trail which was already busy with hikers eager to make it to the top. After 30 minutes, we reached the first bridge with a view towards Vernal Falls. Here…

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Melitzanes Tiganites – Fried eggplants

September 10, 2012 — No Comments ↓

For a late Sunday breakfast, it was the perfect time to make the Greek fried eggplants. All that’s needed for this simple recipe is an eggplant and some dough (water, flour, egg). There are several varieties, sometimes it’s made just with a thin flour coating or without any dough. First thing is to slice the eggplant, sprinkle the slides with a little salt and give it time, so some of the water comes out. In the meantime, I prepared the tzatziki with a grated cucumber, garlic, and yogurt – here it is. After a couple of minutes, I dried the…

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San Francisco

September 8, 2012 — No Comments ↓

Here are some pictures taken during my stay in San Francisco in late June. As I was attending a conference, i did something i usually would skip when traveling alone: A boat ride from Pier 39 passing the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz was part of the social event. And it turned out great, even a couple of the mysterious sea lions showed up on the posts to lazily greet the departing vessel. A week later, when we came back from Yosemite, we did a little detour after our lunch in Berkeley so we could drive over the Golden Gate Bridge.…

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Drupal: Check and render image fields

September 8, 2012 — No Comments ↓

At reclaimyourcity, we have picture and artist nodes and relate them via a node reference. Now some of the artists may have a little profile comprising a picture and a description. When viewing the artist profile and there is no profile picture yet, we want to show the latest submitted picture of the particular artist instead. For this, we first need to check the value of the profile picture field and if it is not set, we need to get and render the latest picture of the artist. The first question is where to perform this check. Fortunately, Drupal offers…

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