Second use for the pot of alubia blanca beans I made Sunday night. We have a lot of tomatillos ripening now, so I was eager to use some. I went searching and landed on this recipe:
I don’t have good photos of my own to share of this one, but is was dead simple to make and came together while the fajita steak and veggies cooked on the grill.
This was a tasty one and I’d definitely make it again. Great side dish for at home Mexican food.
Mosquitos seem worse this year. Everyone in our house is getting bitten like crazy, and the wet spring and summer mean that the swampy areas around us haven’t dried out at all, extending their use as mosquito breeding grounds.
Two things are helping us get through it:
It works, has no smell, and dries quickly. No greasy feel. Repels ticks and mosquitos. Forget those patches that do nothing but make you smell like citronella and end up stuck to the inside of your dryer because you forgot to peel them off.
This stuff works better for me than the various itch relief sticks and hydrocortisone creams we’ve tried.
We stayed at an AirB&B in the Catskills that had a boot dryer back in February, and decided we must have one. Essential gear for people who spend lots of time outdoors.
We use ours all the time. No more worrying if Charlie’s wet shoes will air dry overnight. We toss them on here, turn it on, and they are dry in a few hours. Useful for my wading boots, too.
I don’t have strong opinions on brands for these, since I’ve only ever used two. Having any shoe dryer is better than not having one.
Trying out a different approach to working beans into our meals during the week: Sunday afternoon I cooked a pound of alubia blanca beans on the stove and stuck them in the fridge so I can quickly use them in side dishes throughout the week.
First up: White bean and tomato panzanella from The Bean Book. I can’t find this one online anywhere and I don’t feel right sharing the recipe here, so you’ll need to buy a copy of The Bean Book or check it out from your local library. You won’t regret it. Great book.
I used fresh tomatoes (bumble bee cherry tomatoes), basil, and parsley from our garden. Always lovely to use our own produce.
The dish:
It might have looked a bit more photogenic if I had drained the bean broth from the beans before I put them in the fridge, but I didn’t. Next time I will.
To give you a sense of what it tasted like, it had red onion, garlic, olive oil, red wine vinegar, salt, black pepper, croutons, white beans, tomatoes, basil, and parsley. It was acidic and herbaceous, and it was equal parts creamy and crunchy. It is served cold.
It was a cinch to make since the beans were already cooked. It came together while some sausage was cooking on the grill. I’ll definitely make this again, especially if I have a quarter loaf of dried out bread to use up.
I have two more dishes in mind for the rest of this pound of beans, both with tomatillos. One served warm, the other served cold. Stay tuned.
I had a couple hours of unexpected free time early this afternoon and made it over to my favorite local wild trout stream.
Even in the hottest part of the summer this small, shaded tailwater runs cold. While the other tailwaters here have warm water spilling over the dam after thunderstorms, this one never seems to spill. The releases and flows are remarkably consistent.
I rarely see anyone else on this stream, even when you’d be rubbing elbows with a dozen people on the other streams in the area.
Why do I so often get this stream to myself, even though it is clearly marked in the local fishing guides?
First, the trout here are small, wild fish. You’ll rarely catch anything larger than 8 inches, and when you do, it probably came up from the reservoir to spawn rather then being a permanent resident. I’ve read some old local guidebooks and it was apparently this way in the 70s and 80s, too.
Second, most of the stream is pocket water. There are four big pools on the steam, but most of it looks like this:
The great thing about this pocket water is that there is a small fish behind every rock. But they spook easily, and if you miss a take you probably won’t get a second one from the same fish. That’s okay, there’s plenty more here.
As Art Flick wrote in his essay How to Fish Pocket Water,
It has always been difficult for me to understand why so many trout fishermen spend most of their fishing time in pools or fairly smooth water and so little time working pocket water. Possibly-more likely, probably-they do not realize they are missing a good bet and some mighty interesting fishing.
A euro-nympher I ran into as I was arriving one day and he was leaving said, “I only come here when I can’t fish anywhere else because I kind of get tired of catching these small fish.”
Well, I don’t. I exclusively fish dry flies on this stream and love picking apart these pockets. It is hard to beat the thrill of reading the water, selecting a spot where you think a fish might be, carefully casting a dry fly, and being rewarded with a splashy take.
This one fell for a size 16 beetle. Terrestrials are often a good bet on this stream in mid-to-late summer.
Maybe one in every four times I fish this stream I might run into a kindred spirit who likes fishing pocket water for these small, wild fish, but even then it is never a concern. This stream runs two miles through the woods, without a road in sight.
Sweet solitude. Unheard of on a weekend on the other streams in this watershed.
This place has a lot to offer besides the fish, too. Life is abundant here. Frogs and toads, deer, mallards, herons, crayfish, coyote, owls, and macroinvertebrates. Trout lilies, ramps, and trilliums in the spring. Moss, ferns, fungi, and wildflowers in the summer.
Here’s a few that caught my eye today:
Today I found myself hoofing it back to the car as a thunderstorm rolled in. Despite the hurried dash, I made it back to the car feeling more calm and refreshed for having wiled away three hours rock hopping and casting dry flies to wild brown trout in cold pocket water.
I’ll take the solitude and small fish here to jockeying for a spot any day.
Ghost Pipes popped up after the recent rains. This is my first time seeing one being pollinated!
Since they are white and pop up after rain, I assumed they were a fungus, but apparently they are a plant!
It is striking in appearance because it is completely white in appearance, although individuals can have pink coloration and black specks. How does this plant survive without the green pigment chlorophyll? Chlorophyll is responsible for harnessing the sun’s energy to produce carbohydrates, a process known as photosynthesis. Ghost pipe saps nutrients and carbohydrates from tree roots through an intermediate source, myccorhizal fungi in the genera Russula and Lactarius.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/plant-of-the-week/monotropa_uniflora.shtml
Today I fished the small headwaters of a stream I drive by daily that eventually empties into the Hudson River. When I say small, I mean small. The average depth of the section I fished on state land is probably 6in, with an average width of 5ft.
I saw lots of eastern blacknose dace in the stream, but something slightly different caught my eye too, so I stuck my phone down in the water to record a video to be sure:
Yes! Swimming around with the blacknose dace is a tiny trout parr. I took a temperature reading: 60F, even in shallow water. Great sign on this 85F day. I got out my fly rod and started working the pocket water.
I wasn’t getting any hits at all on my dry flies (I tried a size 16 Mr. Rapidan and a size 18 BWO Sparkle Dun), so I tied on a size 16 bead head hares ear nymph and started working the three pools on that section of the stream.
In the deepest of the three, probably 8 ft deep, a decent sized fish followed my fly right up to the edge and then caught a glimpse of me and swam away with a splash. That caught my attention. It was the only thing bigger than a dace I’d seen. I had to know what it was!
After about 5 minutes of slow casting, I got a strike, but whatever it was didn’t take the fly. I decided to put a tiny indicator on at around 5ft of depth and let the fly slowly float through the pool. The indicator disappeared on the fourth retrieve and I set the hook. The fish jumped out of the water and I knew I found what I came for. I had a trout on the line.
Not just any trout… I caught a brook trout!
What surprised me was the size. 9 inches! I expected something in the ~5in range since the stream is so small. A healthy 9in brook trout was a great thing to find.
I quickly let it go and we went our separate ways. It swam back down to the depths of the pool and I hiked back up the stream to the car.
What a delight to find another stream with native brook trout close to home.
Note to self for my next tying session: More size 16 and 18 bead head hares ear nymphs to sink to the bottom of holes like this.
Jay Guarneri wrote a great article in the 2026 edition of Tenkara Angler about collecting zenmai from ferns and tying kebari with it. He inspired me to go out and collect some of my own zenmai this spring.
Read Jay’s article here, (page 80!) then come back.
What is zenmai? My Best Streams calls it “cotton of flowering fern” and has this pop-over info box:
Flowerring Fern “Zenmai” sprouts about from April to June and those sprouts are covered with cotton. Zenmai is distributed in the Korean Peninsula, China, Taiwan and the Himalayas. The same kind of Zenmai is distributed worldwide except Australasia. There are Yamadori Zenmai / Cinnamon Fern (Osmunda cinnamomea), Yasha Zenmai (Osmunda lancea), Oni Zenmai (Osmunda claytoniana), Royal Fern (Osmunda regalis), besides Zenmai (Osmunda japonica). The cotton of zenmai is often used to the body of traditional tenkara fly. The people who lived in the mountain village spun the cotton of zenmai into thread and made the winter clothes in the old days because this material has performance of water proof. It can be said that it is a wisdom of the mountain village’s people. It is also well known that the sprouts dries and becomes food.
http://www.hi-ho.ne.jp/amago/b-streams/flytying/tenkara.html
Jay recommends looking for Royal Ferns, Cinnamon Ferns, and Interrupted Ferns here in the eastern US. I had a hard time finding them in the woods by our house. Almost all of the ferns I see regularly are not species that make the cotton.
I finally found a patch of Cinnamon Ferns today near a brook and collected about a dubbing pack’s worth of zenmai.
I found the stuff fairly easy to dub with a little wax on my thread. Though as Jay pointed out when I was messaging him on Instagram, I was lucky to get some nice straight fibers, which makes dubbing easier.
I chose to tie futsu-style kebari in size 14 with orange thread and grizzly hackle.
I’ll probably tie some hen pheasant soft hackles next.
I also want to go out and collect some more. I collected from maybe 1/20th of the patch I found. Another bunch similar to what I collected today should do nicely.
Want to buy some zenmai kebari? Go check out Jay’s Kebari Shop on Etsy. He sells them and they look better than mine.
Today during our Trout in the Classroom macroinvertebrate sampling we had something very cool happen: Dozens of tiny BWOs (blue-winged olives) emerged right in our sample bins! Afterward we could see the shucks in the bin. It was great to be able to show the students this happening in realtime.
Also, here is a nice example of a stick caddis we found today:
Marie and Jay invited us over for dinner. Charlie loves playing with their cat, Maisie, so I took a little break from tying stripe bass flies to tie a hookless cat toy for Charlie to take over.
Just different feathers, no flash, because I don’t want the cat to accidentally eat plastic if it gets too excited.
I call it “Maizy’s Deceiver.”
I tied it on a swivel clip, which will be able to clip to the end of a cat toy wand they already have.
Maizy, and the elusive other cat, Bob, seemed to enjoy playing with it.
I used multiple colors on this one, relying on dyed feathers. For the next one I plan on using all natural feathers that haven’t been bleached in any way. I wonder if the cats will enjoy the natural scent?
Charlie’s school had an Earth Day event today and I set up a table on conserving brook trout, New York’s state fish, and the only trout native to the eastern US.
I put together some stuff for all age groups:
The stickers were a big hit.
I ordered them from AssetArtist on Etsy.
The younger students loved the coloring pages, too. Here’s one someone colored:
Amanda helped me make the poster board. I sent a bunch of materials and copy her way and she laid it all out beautifully. Thank you for your help, love!
We had a really fun afternoon at Charlie’s school. It was interesting to see what the students gravitated toward. Some liked the trout, some liked the bugs, some wanted to talk about fishing, some wanted to know about why I like brook trout so much.
Do you want to do a brook trout conservation table? I put together some resources to get you started:
Yesterday I foraged some nice ramps out in the woods. I decided I’d make a spring pasta with them:
I drove over to Tuscana Pasta, a local pasta maker here in Peekskill, and picked up some fresh cavatelli.
I didn’t follow a recipe and I won’t try to write one here.
I added:
In each bowl, I topped the pasta with some fresh burrata, meant to be mixed in while you eat.
It was great! I typically only forage ramps once each spring, so they are a special treat. I look forward to them again next spring.
Today I caught a beautiful wild brook trout today in Westchester County, just five miles from my house. I’d heard whispers that this small stream contained brook trout, and I was delighted to catch one on my first outing there.
I’ve caught brook trout in Cross River, but since so much stocking goes in there, it is hard to tell whether they are wild or holdovers.
But in today’s stream, which I’m not going to name here, I am pretty certain this brook trout is wild, as there are no stocking records I can find for this stream.
New technique: Sticking your iPhone down in the water while running a video to film the fish swimming away.
A beauty!
I caught it in classic brookie territory: Around the deadfalls.
The stream also has some nice macroinvertebrate life, including some giant stoneflies and some free floating caddis, both of which are indicator species of clean water, which was running at 54F today.
This stream is a wonder. Small, but full of life. I also saw a turtle trying to disguise itself as a rock:
This small stream is a gem hidden away in Westchester. Who would have thought we have wild brook trout here? We do. Let’s conserve them.
For this week’s bean adventure, I made Charro Beans, or Frijoles Charros. I looked at multiple recipes and cobbled together my own, which I’ll attempt to put down in words here:
Notes:
Since I made a full pound of beans, I had plenty of leftovers.
What do you do with leftover charro beans? According to Arnie Tex, you turn them into Frijoles Puercos.
I used a blend of Arnie’s recipe and this recipe from Maricruz Avalos:
I used Oaxaca cheese, which Charlie calls Mexican String Cheese. It basically is!
The Frijoles Puercos were great. We ate it as an appetizer the first day, then the next day we put it in breakfast tacos with scrambled eggs. Highly recommended.
Amanda even put some on a hot dog in place of chili, and now she is requesting that I make another batch soon.
I think I’ll make some for the next friend hang cookout.
Following my post containing the scans of Cecil Heacox’s 1969 Charmed Circle of the Catskills articles, Ed Ostapczuk emailed that Heacox did a follow up in the May 1972 edition of Outdoor Life on Catskill Flytyers. Naturally, I had to track that one down, too.
It turned out to not be online either, so I set some eBay alerts for that edition and got a hit a few days later.
Here it is, also available on the Internet Archive:
I donated the physical 1969 copies to the Jerry Bartlett Angling Collection at the Phoenica Library. I’ll donate this May 1972 copy as well the next time I’m out that way.
At some point, I think someone needs to publish a Cecil Heacox Collected Works project. Perhaps that is my responsibility, now that I’ve confronted the possibility. If you want to help with that, let me know.
One interesting aside: I noticed that Outdoor Life republished the March 1969 Cecil Heacox Charmed Circle articles online today. I can’t help but think my tracking the article down last month and sharing it widely popped up on their radar and prompted them to republish it. I might never know. Regardless, I’m happy to have multiple versions available online now for redundancy and resilience.
I walked and fished the section of the Pocantico River running through Rockefeller Preserve to document disturbances with TU’s RIVERS app as part of the Big Apple Brook Trout program.
Some main takeaways:
The largemouth bass I was surprised to catch when I was casting to rising trout:
After three weeks of walking through the woods at night looking at vernal pools with a flashlight, I finally found a spotted salamander!
They are slow on land, but pretty quick to swim away and hide in water. I had to be patient and wait about 30 minutes for this one to come back out after I initially spooked it.
Such neat little creatures.
Charlie and I have been keeping an eye on the patches of Trout Lilies in our local woods, and today they were in full bloom.
Much to my dismay, I learned after lugging my SLR out that I had forgotten the memory card in my card reader on my desk. So iPhone photos will have to suffice.
We also saw some Wood Anemone and fiddlehead ferns:
Charlie found a black and yellow feather that we think is probably from a Northern Flicker.
Lots happening in our yard, too. Arugula, radishes, and volunteer tomatillos are sprouting, the rhododendron, forsythia, and tulips are blooming, and the yard is full of violets.
Jon and I got out today on the Croton River for the first row of the season.
Charlie and I spent some time earlier this week scrubbing out the guideboat and getting it cleaned up. Despite being wrapped in a tarp in my boat racks behind the workshop, some raccoons found their way in and made a mess.
Inspired by Brian Schulz, I picked up some Aere Beach Rollers to use as float bags in the guideboat. Think of them as repurposed inflatable dock bumpers.
I’ve never flipped, but they give me piece of mind going out in the Hudson during windy weather, and when taking Charlie out. I strapped them in with 4ft x 1in straps.
They did not interfere with my rowing, and I found them comfortable as arm rests and to lean my legs against. They also had a secondary benefit of holding my removable seat in place, even when the boat is upside down on top of the car.
Tertiary benefit: Decent makeshift fly rod holder.
Jon and I plan to do some tests when it is warmer out. We’ll row up to a favorite swimming hole and flip one boat with float bags and one without float bags and compare the difficulty we have in recovering them. Both of us know how to self-rescue in kayaks, but haven’t tried in the guideboats before, so it should be interesting.
One of the main draws of the Adirondack Guideboat is the overall stability because of their shape and displacement volume. Still, good to be prepared, especially when a 4yo is a passenger.
Speaking of Charlie, he didn’t go with me today because I don’t feel comfortable taking him out on the water when it is this cold. The water temp was 53F and the air temp was around 56F. Too cold for someone without much body fat who is still learning to swim. I promised to take him out as soon as it warms up.
As Jon and I were rowing back downriver, someone on a dock waved us over. We met Gareth Hougham of the Hudson Valley Stream Conservancy, who recognized our Adirondack Guideboats and wanted to see them and chat with us. Gareth is a delightful guy doing great conservation work in the area, and I’m glad we got to meet.
A secondary reason for going out today was to try casting a fly rod from the guideboat for the first time. Can you believe I’ve had the guideboat for almost 5 years and hadn’t cast a line from it yet? I brought my 8wt striped bass rod and cast it around the mouth of the Croton River, though still on the Croton side of the train trestle. Way too windy today to go out into the bay.
I didn’t catch anything, but I did get some practice casting from the boat and now all my gear is ready. I’ll go out again soon and target some striped bass for real.
Nice evening out on the water. Looking forward to the 2026 season.
We saw this post on Instagram about dipping daffodils in beeswax to preserve them and decided to try it out.
Here they are:
Amanda strung them and hung them above the mantle.
Here’s one (with a bonus mini one) in a dry vase on my bookshelf, still looking great after 6 days.
I looked at the trout stocking pages on the DEC’s site for the first time today for Westchester and Putnam counties:
I prefer wild fish, but there are only a few streams in this region with wild populations, so the state stocks the others.
Two things stick out to me:
They didn’t stock the regular Cross River going through Ward Pound Ridge this year, just the reservoir. They usually stock up by Kimberley Bridge, making that a popular pool to catch fish. There’s often multiple people up by the bridge jockeying for a spot. Without stocked fish, that pool will be a lot skinnier this year. I have caught non-stocked brook trout and fallfish in that pool (the state only stocked brown trout there the last few years), so you can still catch fish there, but this year it is probably going to be more productive to fish the lower sections of the river through the woods. This section is not stocked by DEC, but it is the spot where the TIC trout releases are done, so it is likely that fish you catch there are survivors that have grown up. Perhaps the state thinks that the TIC releases are enough for Cross River? There is the possibility of wild fish down there, too. Let’s hope that the lack of stocking might help the brook trout populations in the stream grow and reproduce. I caught a nice little brook trout on a dry fly in there this afternoon.
DEC also didn’t stock Boyd’s Corner this year. There are typically a few wild fish and stocked holdovers in there, if you can find them. I like to hit this stream late summer when the terrestrials are out, but I might go earlier this year because it will be nice not to have the hordes of spin casters there targeting stocked fish. The stocked spots are always busy in April, and I prefer solitude.
I’m intrigued by the rainbow trout below the Croton dam, in the east branch, and in the Titicus River. Last year the Titicus was so low it wasn’t worth fishing. With plenty of rain this spring it might be worth visiting in May. Below the Croton dam is good in June, because the NYC DEP has to release cold water through the end of June, when everywhere else is starting to heat up.
I’ve been lax on the bean dishes the last couple weeks, but I’m back with a good one: Alison Roman’s Caramelized Beans with Tomato & Cabbage.
It was good! Pretty easy to make. Not a lot of active time, mostly waiting on things to cook.
I used cabbage and tomatoes from my freezer, since I’ve been on a kick to eat through our frozen food so we can rotate it. I think this would have been better with fresh cabbage, because I wasn’t able to brown the frozen cabbage. Oh well. Still good.
My photos are not as nice looking as Alison Roman’s. Not a super photogenic dish. Tasty, though.
Don’t skip the vinegar or the parmesan cheese. The dish definitely benefits from both.
I cooked some cannellini beans from scratch for this, Marcella Beans.
I’m keeping this in mind whenever I have leftover cannellini beans or a head of cabbage I don’t know what to do with. Definitely a filling cool weather dish, great for this rainy day.
I am thankful March 2026 was much different than March 2025, when I was in the hospital for a blood clot in my kidney. I’m doing fine now, and I reflected more on that in my birthday post.
March started with some fly tying and catching my first trout of the season with snow on the ground.
March ended with a backyard spring break art party so warm that a few people were wearing shorts.
My weather station recorded a low of 15.4°F on 3/2/26 and a high of 81.7°F on 3/10/26. Wild month weather-wise.
Some March highlights:
I’m glad to see the natural world waking up again. Crocuses, bluebells, daffodils, and forsythias all blooming. Trees budding out. Spring peepers and green frogs. Charlie and I saw a snapping turtle and a snake by the pond this week.
We’ve spent a lot of time outside this month. Lots of bike rides, swinging, and cooking in the mud kitchen after school, woods walks, planting grass seed, and tromping around in water. It is good to be outside.
Charlie and I had lunch one day at the train station.
My friend Tyler texted that he built a swing set for his son. I get such a kick out of people building these.
I got to hang out with some friends at a recording studio while they jammed for Jeremy’s birthday. I’m not a musician, but it was cool to chill and listen to them.
I drove over to Boiceville in the Catskills to listen to Ed Ostapczuk’s presentation on identifying unique heritage brook trout strains at the Ashokan-Pepacton TU chapter meeting. I was excited to meet Ed after reading his writing, and I appreciated the conversations I had with many of the chapter members.
Charlie’s class made a little village and we got to go see it.
Mom and Dad came to visit. Dad taught me how to replace copper plumbing with Pex and helped me replace our shower hardware and valves. We also walked around Beacon. They also helped with the trout release.
While they visited, they hung out with Charlie one evening so Amanda and I could go on a date. It was excellent, and the company was so good I forgot to take a photo.
We had a tea party.
The rhubarb forcing is going well.
I ended the month by tying some synthetic polyester fur Clouser minnows. I want to get out and fish for striped bass soon!
Charlie ended the month by climbing our hydrangea, which he calls “the tumbleweed tree.”
2026 Trout Release season is underway for the Trout in the Classroom program here in the Croton Watershed!
I went out on Monday to help with the macroinvertebrate sampling, student macro identification, and the releases. It was spring break for Charlie and my parents were in town, so the three of them came along for the day.
The macroinvertebrate sampling was excellent, as it always is on the Cross River.
In about 10 minutes, Ihor, George, and I collected:
By the time the students arrived and we were helping them identify the macros, little black stoneflies were hatching and landing on them. Some loved it and some hated it, but it was great to be able to show them both the nymph and adult stage of the stoneflies.
Charlie walked around with my Bug Book and showed the students pictures of adult stoneflies and mayflies.
“This is a stonefly. It means the water is really clean!”
Charlie, 4 years old
He is exactly right, stoneflies are an indicator species and are only found in clean water.
As much as the students are fascinated with seeing the bugs from the stream that the trout eat, the main event is definitely releasing the baby trout they hatched in their classrooms and cared for.
Mackenna from the NYC DEP walked them through equalizing the bucket temperature with the stream and handed out baby trout to the eager students, who said goodbye and wished the baby fish well.
After the students all got to release trout, they were nice enough to let Charlie release one, too. He was thrilled.
It was a great day. I signed up to help with another one next month.
If you are a teacher and are interested in raising trout in your classroom, or a TU member interested in helping with a TIC release, reach out!
Last year’s post:
Another nighttime walk in the woods with rubber boots and a flashlight. Lots of green frogs out tonight.
Charlie and I went and explored a creek about 13 minutes away from our house. I heard rumors that there is a native brook trout population there and Charlie jumped at the chance to try out his new waders. Win-win. It was a beautiful sunny day, and we only needed a light jacket.
The first great sign was little black stoneflies everywhere. A hatch was going on while we were there and they were crawling all over us. Charlie didn’t seem to mind.
Lots of skunk cabbages popping up, too.
We had a little chat about wading safely in moving water and found him a wading stick.
Charlie’s waders are from HISEA. They seem to be pretty good quality, kept him dry, and include a wading belt. If you have a young one who is interested in creeks, rivers, marshes, and the like, get them a pair.
Great afternoon exploring. Charlie found a black walnut, a nice piece of birch bark (we talked about how it was once used like paper), and some small pinecones.
The creek looks fishy to me. Good flows, clean water, macroinvertebrate life, some deep holes, lots of deadfalls. I’m eager to come back with a rod and see if I can find some brook trout.
