Israel: King Solomon's Pillars & an Ancient Egyptian Mining Goddess!

On our Israeli drive south to Eilat we stopped to see King Solomon's Pillars amd the ancient copper mines at Timna Park- and stumbled into an ancient Egyptian temple dedicated to miners! How cool is that?! Timna Park was another amazing place I'd never been to, as I'd always gone to Eilat by bus from Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, and so never got to stop along the way! This time Dan and I had a rental car, and so we stopped at every cool thing we discovered, and this oasis- with a beautiful lake in the middle of it- was one of them! The neatest thing for us, living, as we do, smack in the middle of the southern West Virginia coal mines, was to find the ancient shrine to the Egyptian goddess Hathor, patroness of miners! Approx. 8,000 stone circles that led to copper mine shafts were discovered in Timna Park- these were the first copper mines in the world! (A by-product of Israeli copper mining is the beautiful turquoise gem known as the Eilat Stone, a classic component of modern Israeli jewelry. My dad bought me a beautiful silver Eilat Stone necklace in Israel in 1973 which I still have!)

Israeli Eilat Stone Jewelry

Dan, Walkin' Like an Egyptian!





From the Israeli website: "The star of Timna Park is Solomon’s Pillars, towering sandstone columns so perfectly formed that you might really think they were a gargantuan public works project initiated by the biblical king for whom they are named. But of course, they, like all the other formations in the 23-square-mile park, are nature’s handiwork. So are stripes of magma frozen in geological time in the cliffs, and the sandstone, in its soft palette of pastels, shaped by wind and water into strange shapes like “the mushroom” and “the sphinx.”  (They give you a cool map when you arrive, so we got to see them all!)

Ancient entrance to a copper mine shaft, Timna

Archaeological site at Timna

Timna's Ancient Copper Mines



Ancient Temple of Hathor, Egyptian Mining Goddess






Ancient Temple of Hathor, Egyptian Mining Goddess

Dan, at the Lake at Tmna Park

While we were there, a team of event designers were setting up what was, without a doubt, THE event of the season: a gala with dining, music, and dancing under the stars at the temple! We almost crashed it (not for nothing do we travel with Black Tie in our carry-on bags...), but decided to high-tail it to Eilat, as a fabulous guest room awaited us at the Leonardo Plaza Hotel Eilat, with, as we were to discover, a romantic (*wink wink*) balcony overlooking the Red Sea!
Next: Snorkeling, Sea-Dooing, and Camel-Trekking in Eilat!

The days of (West Virginia) Wine and... Ramps!

Through no fault of our own, heaven knows, we missed the 71st Ramp Fest of Richwood, West Virginia. :-( And we were Seriously bummed, because the "Feast of the Ramson", in THE Ramp Capital of the World, is something Chef Dan and his Foodie Wife have been aching to attend for 8 years!
As readers of this blog know, Dan and I are planning two very special events at the Elkhorn Inn in May: our "WV Wine-Tasting Dinner Weekend" May 14-16, and our "Dueling Dining-Car Chefs" Weekend May 28-30, with Guest Chef, James Porterfield, railroad historian and author of "From the Dining Car" & "Dining By Rail"! We've spent months working on both events, having a Ball "researching" a bevy of WV wines (our WV Wine Shortlist will be my next post), and sourcing fabulous WV specialty foods, and asking our "fans" on Facebook and Twitter (Tweet us @elkhorninn) for suggestions! (A desert of West Virginia Jones Cabin Run Vineyard Port Wine & Holl's WV "Aztec" chili-chocolate truffles was the lastest & greatest suggestion, and yes, we're planning to include that!) Dan and Jim have crafted their menus for our "Railfan Gourmet Throwdown", and we've posted them under "Events" on the Elkhorn Inn's Facebook fan page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Eckman-WV/Elkhorn-Inn-Theatre/53453051478?ref=s
And now: Back to the Saga of the Ramps! Ramps are a wild leek, an allium of the onion-garlic family, and while made fun of in West Virginia (as are a lot of things...), they are a gourmet delicacy in France, Japan, Canada, and other countries, and are both rare and endangered- and they grow wild here in our West Virginia mountains! Kirkwood Winery in Summerville, WV even makes a fabulous Ramp Wine (pictured above in our selection of wines for our May 14-16 WV Wine-Tasting Dinners Event) that Chef Dan uses for marinating meats and in reduction sauces! Because the Elkhorn Inn & Theatre is located in an (oddly for WV) Ramp-Free Zone, for some time Dan & I have wanted to plant ramps on our property, in the hopes that they'd go wild, live long, and prosper. And so, after phone calls and basically a solid week of planning, come Sunday, April 18 (the day printed in West Virginia South magazine), we drove 2 hours up and down the winding mountain roads of southern WV all the way to Richwood High School, practically Drooling with anticipation... only to find that the Ramp Feast had been on SATURDAY, April 17! AAAAUGH! Sounds silly, but we were SO mouthwateringly ready for a Feast O' Ramps, that I was nearly in tears! Driving back out of town, Totally down-in-the-mouth, we pulled into the Gateway Cafe to get a bite (of Anything), & I spied "Rampburgers" on the menu... Full of hope, I poured out our Sad Saga of Missing The Ramps Of Spring to the owner, and she offered to make us the Classic WV Ramp Breakfast they serve during the few short weeks of WV's spring ramp season! Delicate spring ramps sauteed in butter, accompanied by hashbrowns, perfectly scrambled eggs, crispy, meaty bacon, red pinto beans, & cornbread! TOTALLY YUM-O!

And Then she told us we could buy ramps- to cook or plant in our garden- just up the road a-piece at Donaldson's Greenhouse!

So we trundled up the road & got us a bushel & a peck (and a hug around the neck) of ramps, and a copy of THE Ramp Bible: "Having Your Ramps... And Eating Them, Too" by Glen Facemire, Jr.! (And yes, he is related to the late Rodney Facemire, who started Kirkwood Winery in Summerville, WV that makes the AbFab Ramp Wine- as well as wonderful Ginseng & fruit wines- AND Real (legal) WV Whisky!) And so Chef Dan now has a whole Mess of Ramps to plant tomorrow behind the Inn, in a Nice Shady Spot that will hopefully appeal to the tres tempremental little bulbs! I read Facemire's book in the car while we tooled thru the mountains, and learned an Awful lot- including that they Are tricky little devils to raise- the seeds can take 18 months to germinate! :-O

Happily sated by our excellent ramp brunch, we drove the 12 minutes to Lewisburg, and took in the ultimate moments of the the "Extreme Horsemaship" events at the Horse Show at the WV Fairgrounds, watching some Seriously talented men and women display some pretty damn fine horsemaship, steering untrained horses through an obstacle course ranging from barrel jumping to bridges, to pulling 350 lb. haybales and filled water cans, to turning in perfect circles and walking backwards... fine stuff! We also stopped to read the historic markers along the way, and to see the Miner's Memorial in Quinwood, WV, especially important this week, given that 29 miners just lost their lives in (yet another) West Virginia Mine Disaster... The memorial, simple and tasteful, has granite memorials engraved with the names of hundreds of our miners who have given their lives to keep the lights on all over America, and the flags were at half-mast, as they are all over West Virginia now...

And then, at the end of a Wonderful West Virginia Day, we got to drive home along the roads cut thru our frankly amazing mountains, in their various spring stages of turning green and pink, loving all of it: the red bud trees in bloom, the geese crossing the road oblivious to it all, the deer grazing and the cattle chowing down in the valleys between the mountains, the log cabins that have been here since the 1700s...

C'mon down and have a peek! :-)