Quickie

Just a short update on the cooking and plant front.

I made this delightful Qunoa with apricots and raisins.


I'd try a different dressing though. The onion just wasn't my kinda thing. Supper easy to make. As always, make your own with a recipe right here.


And we have a new addition to the plant family!


I saw this little guy outside the store and just couldn't resist. Haven't had time to put it in proper soil though. I hope it will survive till I get back from Camping.

Pages and Pages

Oh Toronto, my love hate relationship with you is about to intensify in the 'hate' direction.

30 Years after its inception, in the ones strange and obscure Queen St. W, Pages bookstore is closing its doors. Pushed out by rising rent prices in the now uber-hip Queen St W. with its overpriced boutiques, and shoe stores - a mall without a roof. Pages was a great little store, with a great selection of independent press, books on politics, art, and friendl staff who always ask you first if you are a student so they can give you a discount. Pages was wonderful and I'm devastated that it will be gone at the end of August. We payed our tribute last weekend by giving them some money for some books. Once again, even in its last days, Pages does good by me by pulling me out of my reading slump and delivering to my greedy eyes these new books.


Russian Fairy Tales translated by Norbert Guterman
I Am Cat (Three Vol in One) by Soseki Natsume
What is the What by Dave Eggers
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of The World by Haruki Murakami
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

I will be starting I Am Cat first. It sounds lovely, and will be perfect as a read for my week long camping trip.

We will miss you pages.

In other news of reading, I also visited Labirynth, the comic book store in the Annex and procured


Vol 1 of award winning Queen and Country,
Ex Machina by Brian K Vaughan Book 4
and
Tom Strong by Alan Mooore Book 1

Plant Mutilation

Sad news in the Green Thumb of my life. My Natal Plum is doing awfully. I had to hack away at the dry and dead parts, which, as you can see, was most of them, to give these young ones a chance.


I think I need to replant it maybe. I can't tell if I over watered it, under-watered it, or didn't give it enough sunshine or maybe it's just too hot where it is. I'll have to take it to the ladies at Wilbebloomin to see if they can advise anything.

Also the littlest seaberry sprout died from too much sun. It's been scorching here for a few days. The other two, however, are doing well.


I still don't have a place to plant the one that will become an outdoor tree, though I think some friends of mine who just moved have an ample backyard. We'll see. All the other plants are doing more or less ok. The recent heatwave and their exposure to the sun did some damage so I am keeping on eye on all of them and keeping them out of direct sun for the time being.

Sunday Food Adventures pt 2

Finally had enough time to make food this weekend. Nothing too exciting, and I'm not too happy with how one of these turned out. There was a recipe without instructions on this website. They looked and sounded wonderful. Keeping in mind here that I have never, ever, baked a pie or made pie crust.

I followed the ingredient amounts, but added strawberries to the mix (locally grown of course!). I had a lot of issues with the dough, and the lack of a rolling pin in the house as also less than a benefit to the final product. In the end, these little pies taste like pie. The roommates like them, but as with all pies, I find the crust is just too much crust. They also took me way longer than expected to make, as I had to make another batch of dough to use up all the filling. I was exhausted when it was all over.

They are yummy, bur require an ample glass of milk or tea to wash down the crust. If you're a more experienced baker, I definitely recommend this recipe. You just can't go wrong with Rhubarb and Strawberries.

My actual dinner, which I got to after two hours of baking, was a baguette with vegan cream cheese and roasted red pepper spread, available here.


I like it because it require no cooking, and after the long day of baking I had I was happy to just mix and eat. It does require a bit of fine chopping, but it turned out wonderfully well. It is garlicky, be forewarned. I'm not vegan, but I went with the recipe as is because I'm an inexperienced cook and am too scared still to get things wrong, but now that I've made it if I were to make it again, I would go for regular cream cheese. We'll see how it holds up after a night in the fridge.

Outside In Socks

Sock knitting continues with the completion of one Outside-In sock. I must say that Socks that Rock always looks so yummy in a skein, but I find myself not always as delighted at the pooling in the finished product. I also absolutely have to figure out the right needle size for me for socks. I've had the hardest time knitting in the right gauge, always either too big or just a tad too small. I'm also quite sure that I'm done with sock knitting on wooden double pointed. At size 2.25 my needles start to look like tiny bows, and I've lost more than one needle in the process. So I am exploring some other options. Plastic just seems evil, so I'm on the look out of some metal needles. Romni is having a sale and I have yet to make use of it. I'm doing my best to keep myself at bay until I knit up all the new yarn I've bought over the last three years. Which, before you stare at me agape, is not actually that much.

I'm also pondering a little feature to add to here. I'll see how my time goes, but I'll keep it to myself for now. It's knitting related, I cant tell you that much.

Fruit and Social Collapse

I'm not sure what it is with fruit and season. Even after writing an entire paper on the issues I'm still dumbstruck by how much higher the price of locally grown fruits or vegetables is. I have said it before, and I will say it again, the modern food system is not working.

People can tell me whatever they want officially, but organic and food grown closer to home tastes better. I can't eat regular tomatoes since I've had organic. And to think, that I refer to tomatoes grown in the most intrusive way possible as 'regular'. Every once in a while I come across either home grown or organically produced local fruits or vegetables and am reminded with brute, delicious, force of how good food can taste.

It took me a long time to adjust to food in Canada, and part of that adjustment was giving up certain foods because I could no longer stand the taste of them, and a new allergy, a response to most fruits and vegetables, that made eating painful. Once in while, I bite into a peach, a strawberry, a watermelon and all I can think bout is how delicious these were, picked right out of my grandparents back yard. The strawberries required no sugar, in fact most fruit had their own plentiful sweetness that even my child's tongue was satisfied with. I never had these things all year round, as far as I can recall, but I never thought about it that way. These were what you ate in the summer, and between school holidays and warm weather this made summer an ever more anticipated time every year. I still find myself looking forward to Summer with a special zeal, rarely rewarded by anything specific. Work carries on, so do responsibilities, but Summer still feels like the last day of school and I try to capture that childhood feelings by avoiding fruits out of season and waiting for the local fair to show up in my local fruit market.

I personally believe that getting used to season availability and less variety is inevitable in the future. Every major paper on the subject of agriculture has similar dire predictions. Long distance and high input requirements into food combined with growing demand of western like diets is eating up all fertile and available land, strains the water table, and produces increasingly lower nutrient food. We can't even imagine food at a higher price or a scarcity of food. There would be riots, anger, and yet we've all gone along with it, never willing to accept the price of cheap food and its real cost. I can only hope that the trend in the 3rd world, or at least some place in the 3rd world toward sustainable, traditional, and organic food production will hold strong and spread, and I hope that that industrialized countries put even more towards protecting small farmers and promoting local consumption. Otherwise, be it population, energy availability, or climate, we're all going to be in trouble in the next two or three decades.

Get Up. Go to work. Go home. Go to bed.

I am now in the world of the 9-5, at least for a year. After that, who knows. I have a new job, taking over someone's maternity leave. This means more tired at the end of the day and less time over all to do the things I planned to do this summer. I'm not complaining. It was my choice to apply and my choice to accept the position. It will, if nothing else, give me something that looks very good on a resume and boost my income enough for the year to start hacking away at that student loan of mine, get my own place, and take a few evening credits for my degree. It also takes me out of the front line of the job for a while, which I've been wanting to do for some time.

Rain, Rocks, and Socks

Argh! I try and try to stay on top of things. I will have to make it a much more regular thing. Not just weekends. Even if I have nothing exciting to say I will just write it down so that I can get into the habit of it. That is, after all, my main reason for starting this in the first place.

In short. No cooking has happened. It has been too hot and I haven't had the time.

The seaberry tree is doing well, although the recent sun and heat killed the smallest sprout. The larger two, however, are doing beautifully and will be ready for transplanting soon. Now I just need to find someone with a back yard or some dirt for my little tree to live in.

Last weekend we braved the thunderstorms and promises of rain for Elora Gorge. We spent the first night getting lost ( my fault for printing out only the verbal Google Maps directions and not the maps themselves) - who knew that there were about a thousand roads in the southern Ontario all known as Wellington?

The next day we woke up to rain. Misty, drizzly, down pouring, constant rain. Needless to say, although we did brave out around the park for a brief while, most of the day was spent sleeping in the tent, sitting around the fire, and trying to keep dry. There was a beautiful reprieve later on when four of us headed out to get wood and coffee for the rest, and ended up in a country style diner munching on proper breakfast while our comrades cooked beans on the fire back at the camp site.

Sunday, finally, was a gift from nature. We found the rocks we had come there to climb, and T and J were kind enough to set up top ropes for us to safely ascend on. It was also particularly wonderful that the rocks overlooked the gorge, with water sparkling and shallow and warm enough to excite the blood and take a brief dip in. We climbed, we splashed about, it was over all a fantastic day that made up for the whole messy weekend. Besides, all and all, camp fire, friends, tents, and lover? Even without the climbing the weekend would have been deeply satisfying.


As for the knitting! Oh the knitting. I have finished one sock of the Layburn pattern, and simply out of boredom with the pattern took up the Outside In sock from the latest Knitty.com issue. I loved the Socks that Rock Yarn I got for it, but honestly, the way it pooled leaves me less than impressed. Still, I just love knitting with this yarn so much, I can even put up with poor colour pooling for the experience.

There. Quick and dirty. I will try to follow up with some more things in a bit.
Like my new awesome job which I love love love.

Keeping up!

It figures I would set up a blog and forget to write in it.

Another weekend passes. I always look forward to Sundays, and yet they are always the most difficult days for me to deal with. Now that school is over I feel like I can do just about anything, and that thought itself paralyzes me at times.

We drank into the wee night, and even though I am not normally a drinker, and had a glass of champagne followed by half a bottle of butter-ripple I had no hangover, but did suffer from lack of sleep for which I feel I am still paying.

Saturday started late. Very late. We spent the day entertaining a friend of M's from out of town for his big 30th birthday. This mostly involved hanging around the docks, watching them drink beer, followed by hiding out in Ms room while the boys played N64 Golden Eye. The most exciting part of the evening was watching a guy's roof catch fire not 10 feet away from where we were having our 4pm breakfast.

Sunday I finally put my hand to some cooking, as was my intention when I finished school for the summer. Both recipes were from Vegetarian Times June 2008. The Cashew-Mushroom Pate (p69) was a struggle. Lack of proper food process meant having to attempt the puree of the mixture using two different blenders, neither of which really did what I wanted it too. It tastes way to nutty for my liking, and is not very pretty to look at. I'm not entirely sure what the compulsion was behind creating a nut-heavy food considering I really dislike nuts. I was thinking of M. He loves nuts, so I will leave it to him to consume.

The Curried Potatoes (Pg 80) were much more successful. Though much to my dismay, and in no way the fault of the recipe, my version did not look as good as the magazine one, and tasted a lot like the Vegan Root Stew I have been known to make, also from Vegetarian Times. It's difficult to taste the curry, which may be my problem of not putting enough in, and the one tiny jalapeno I put in there overwhelms the dish with spice, as least too much for my liking. I would make this again, in a more colder season and cut the jalapeno amount in half.

On the knitting front, the Casbah Sock has been like a nightmare. It's not a bad yarn, but with just one skein and a desire to stay away from socks has left me with few choices. I have also struggled with picking the right pattern for the colour without having to purchase more yarn. I even thought about making a hat out of it, but the silk content makes it a bit too floppy for hat. I found a sock pattern, Leyburn Socks, however, and I'm doing my best to stick to it. It's looking good so far, but I am becoming more and more aware of just how lose my knitting is, and how little gauge swatches actually help me figure out what needle size to use. I am knitting socks on size 2 needles which should have been at least 3.75 size. That is far too many sizes of needle down, and yet I could probably go down even lower.


So far, this means that most things I knit I end up having to re-knit several times to get the size right. That sweater I intend to knit before the year is over is looking more and more intimidating with this problem on the horizon.

And finally! My Seaberry tree seeds have sprouted and are doing beautifully. Two of the spouts died, but three are going strong, and I already know which one will eventually have the joy of being transplanted outdoors to do its wonderful work of cleaning up air and producing oxygen.

Doors Open

On Friday I became the proud owner of a this camera, a Nikon D60. I decided I wanted to take better photos and to learn more about photography so I said goodbye to my cannon point and shoot and forked over $700+ for this entry level DSLR. I haven’t owned or us

ed a DSLR since grade 9 when I took a photography class. I am very excited about learning with this, and so far it has not disappointed. This is particularly important as I had spend nearly four hours trying to decide between the D60 and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX3, the best Point and Shoot camera on the market ( and it looks so cool and retro). When I finally went back to the store the clerk informed that they don’t have any FX3 in stock, and that it is in fact out of stock in most of Canada. This made the decision that much easier and so I can now look artsy taking pictures with my big ass lens and camera.

The perfect time to test the baby out came yesterday at the annual Doors Open Toronto. If you don’t live in Toronto, or simply have no idea what this is, it’s a two day event where buildings and places that are normally either off limits or have costs to get into are free and open to go into. A way to encourage people to explore Toronto. M and I tried our best to get up early to see as much as possible, including Don Jail which we mistakenly went to last year and had to explain to the warden what were were on about trying to see an active jail like tourists. Unfortunately we didn’t make to the Don, or to much of anything. We did however spend a considerable amount of time at Exhibition Grounds at the Animal Services, the Horse Stable, and the oldest house in Toronto, followed by a long ride back downtown to the Japan Foundation and George Brown House. We tried to get into the parliament building but the tours had already ended by the time we got there.