doing as the islanders do

i've spent the past few days at my parents home on vancouver island enjoying the sunshine and quiet. the only downside of the peace and quiet is that it's hard to sleep when it's completely silent and you're used to falling asleep to the sound of trains slamming together. what a thing to complain about!

i've been trying to get hans to help me move the old clipper canoe down to the water because i'm not confident i could portage it down several flights of stairs without killing myself. i just want to go for a quick paddle, but he doesn't want me to go out alone. he doesn't care how good i am in the canoe, he just knows i am an awful swimmer. i'm one of those people who can't just sit and enjoy the sunshine though. i have to be doing something. so with no canoe or kayak, and not wanting to walk through the woods where i wouldn't be able to enjoy the sun, i tried to find something to busy myself with. so i dug a hole. i recommend you try it sometime, because it's really satisfying. it's crazy wild here on the island.

and when i'm not digging holes, i like to make homemade granola. i know, i'm out of control. clearly the reason i didn't go to sxsw this year is because i've turned into an old person. but this granola is so damn good that i'm glad i put down my crochet hook and got my bifocals out long enough to make it. it's much better than digging holes, so you should make it too.

best granola ever
6 cups rolled oats
2 cups whole almonds
1 1/2 cups shredded or flaked coconut
3/4 cup hazelnuts
1/2 cup sesame seeds (i used black)
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
1/2 cup pumpkin seeds
1/2 cup brown sugar
3 teaspoons ground allspice
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon fleur de sel
3/4 cup olive oil
6 tablespoons honey
2 cups pitted dates, each cut crosswise into quarters
3/4 cup dried cranberries

preheat oven to 300°F. mix first 12 ingredients in large bowl. melt honey into the olive oil in a saucepan over low heat, then pour it over the granola mixture and stir well. spread out mixture over 2 large baking sheets. bake about 20 minutes, stirring 2-3 times. stir in the dried fruit and then continue baking until golden brown. this can take between 15 and 40 minutes depending on how deep the pans are and how often you stir the mix. cool and store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 2 weeks.

you can really use any dried fruit, i just happened to have dates and cranberries.

more homemade for the holidays

a butterfly for my sister, originally uploaded by squirrel_of_snooze.
the past two days have been spent frantically baking, wrapping, organizing, cleaning, running errands... it's been busy! i'm sure it's like that for everyone, and i'm sure everyone is wondering when the holiday part of this season will actually begin!

this is a little watercolour mounted butterfly i made for my little sister for christmas. i'm going to wrap it right now, but thought i'd take a photo first! she's 13 so she generally hates everything, so keep your fingers crossed that she hates this less than most things. and keep your fingers crossed that she doesn't know i have a blog, too okay?!

i got the most beautiful painting in the mail today from hadley hutton and i will take a photo of it when i get home and have decided where to hang it. now i'm off to do laundry, wrap some more, and pull my hair out. in that order.

here's what i baked yesterday:

clockwise from top left: les punitions / pine nut rosemary shortbread / chocolate shortbread with cocoa nibs and sea salt / buckwheat butter cookies with cocoa nibs / true spice cookies / world peace cookies

the spice cookies and the world peace cookies are my absolute favourites and i'll definitely make them again next year. and those little puniments, the punitions sablé, are the perfect simple cookie. i baked apricot-pistachio bars over the weekend too, and just pulled them out of the freezer.

thanksgiving

i spent the past couple of weeks dreading thanksgiving. i just find the whole ordeal so daunting and stressful, and i always go into these things thinking i'm going to hate every moment. thankfully, that wasn't the case at all this year. while i did stay up way too late sunday night working on a way too time consuming but delicious sour cream pumpkin pie (my first attempt at the crust went horribly wrong) that could have been an ominous preview of things to come, yesterday's dinner came together almost without a hitch.

the day started with draining the apple cider brine off the turkey (free range, organic, non medicated, and hopefully happy until the bitter end) and giving it a good wash and dry, while i made the stuffing and hans' mother made the cranberry sauce. once the turkey was done we prepared all the vegetables so that as soon as the turkey came out of the oven, they'd be ready to go in. we roasted brussel's sprouts, yellow and red carrots, baby potatoes, and golden and chiogia beets. and while people took turns carving and sampling the turkey, hans' mom made a delicious gravy with chanterelle mushrooms, and i sautéed green beans with butter and slivered almonds and kept my eye on the roasting veggies.

everything went really smoothly, with the exception of the turkey taking about 2 hours longer than we'd anticipated. good thing we stuck the thermometer in the other thigh, or we'd have all been in trouble! there was a 20 degree difference between sides, and the bird looked dry as king tut. i panicked a little inside, but tried to play it cool. a couple of hours later, the other side was done and thankfully it turned out to be the perfect, juicy, tender turkey thanks to the cider brining. i don't think it's possible to make a bad turkey if you brine it. brine brine brine. if i ever wanted to become an ordained minister so i could officiate a wedding, i'd be the leader of the holy church of cider brining.

by the time i went to sleep last night i felt pretty ill, and i woke up with a cold. blah. today i'm working in my pajamas and making turkey soup. holidays can be draining, even when they turn out better than you could have hoped.

blueberry banana bread and the riley park farm market

today i went to the riley park farm market at main and 30th. i'd been to the trout lake farm market off a few times and it felt like i'd been transported to europe. the trout lake market is smaller than the average european ones, and sadly this means that it boasts much less in the way of cheese. despite the cheese deficiency, i love the trout lake market and it's something i look forward to each week.

i didn't make it out there this weekend because of our blueberry mission in the valley, so i decided to take a half-day from work and head up main street today instead. while blueberries are on the mind... the town i grew up in was either literally, or very near close to the blueberry capital of canada, if not the world. since moving to vancouver 10 years ago i haven't been able to stomach the insane cost of my very favourite fruit. i have not once in a decade bought blueberries without making the trek to the valley. blueberries in the city cost 4 times as much as if you just drive a half-hour into the suburbs.

back to the market... i got a 3 pound mix of every kind and colour and stripe of tomato i could find, some fennel, arugula, a medley of beans, beets, summer squash, zucchini, and gigantic similkameen peaches. i've never actually made anything with fennel before, so that will be interesting. i got halibut cheeks too, and i've never tried those. i don't know what to do with any of it so i decided to work my way through the 8 lbs of berries that remain in my fridge. i froze a ton and then made a blueberry banana bread adapted from this recipe i found through orangette. i've use this as a base quickbread recipe all the time, but i always use spelt flour and add ground flax and rolled oats to mine, and cut the sugar by 1/3. this time instead of adding chocolate chips, i added a cup of blueberries.

know your pear

we used to have loose themes in the boompa office, like "pirate" and "beer".

on wednesday i stopped by t&t, the asian supermarket, on my way home from work. we were out of fruit and last week was all about apples for me (with peanut butter), so i was trying to find something different. i discovered that that one produce department had about 6 varieties of pears! yes, i was legitimately excited about the pears. they're pretty, smell nice and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. that said, i've never really been much of a pear fan, but i decided that i should become one so i bought almost $20 worth. i decided that i'd get to know my pears and i'd get the boompa office and my boyfriend in on it.

the following day i had a bosc with breakfast. it was lovely, but i had had boscs before. it was perfectly ripe, not overripe and mushy at all and it tasted like a real pear but had that coarse skin i hate in pears. a bosc is a bosc... not horribly interesting but always good, especially poached, or sometimes with blue cheese. hans and i agreed it was very good.

i brought four other pears with me to the boompa den: sun moon and shinseiki (both japanese) and then yali and golden from china. i ran the idea of "know your pear" by rob and david, our new intern. david, being new, was really interested and talked about t&t and how it's a great place to bring dates because you can eat, watch the fish swimming in tanks, etc.

back to the pears, the sun moon and shinseiko pears are both japanese and are therefore "nashi", (nashi being "pear" japanese), whereas the bartlett or bosc, being english are known as yonashi. awesome, right?

so we tried the sun moon first. this pear was crunchier than your average apple, even a granny smith, but it wasn't at all gritty. it was as juicy as a peach and had a light flowery pear flavour. the skin wasn't terribly tough, as can often be the case, and it was a really beautiful dappled rosy brown colour. pretty, juicy and crunchy - david, rob and i agreed the shinseiko is a very good pear.

we had to leave the office early because it was car free day and sparrow and catlow were playing a huge outdoor stage down the street so we had to cut the pear thing short. i told shannon about it on the way to the show and she didn't get it. i said "you know, like know your onion?" and she said "oh, like spanish, walla walla, red, white, yellow, sweet..." to which i replied "no, like the shins ep."

the next morning (friday) i cut up a yali pear and the chinese golden to have with breakfast. i could tell right away when i cut into the yali that it was going to be trouble. this pear was tough, dry and gritty. it actually looked like it was made up of tiny glistening grains of white sand aggregated together. on top of the texture issue, the yali pear was, thick-skinned and honestly pretty flavourless. according to my research the yali was supposed to be more aromatic and sweet than japanese pears but i found this wasn't the case at all. apparently asian pears don't rippen once they've been picked so i guess it's possible that the yali is really a great pear that was picked to soon. i may never know... the dog wouldn't even eat it. the golden pear looked really nice with it's fine, white skin, but tasted like peas. no offense to china, but my faith in the selective breeding techniques of their horticulture experts over the ages isn't great. these were some bad pears that looks nice.

friday afternoons at the boompa office are really more about building office moral than work. companies on the east coast stop calling at about 2pm our time and we are left to our own devices. so we drink. jen fritz came with beer, patrick breeley came with his whit, and torq campbell came with his snazzy purple velvet jacket. our other intern rachel was there along with david, rob, shannon and scott, and anyone who's been to the boompa office will appreciate that 9 people in that tiny room would make work impossible. so i told patrick all about "know your pear" while sitting on a stack of my project: blue posters, as there were no chairs left in the office. patrick liked it. i told him about how the golden pear tastes like peas and he was down. he agreed that the golden pear tastes like peas and added that the flavour gets stronger as you get closer to the centre. scott was really excited about "know your pear" because he had packed an bartlett with his lunch. the bartlett is the most popular pear around the world. if you've ever bought a can of pears they were probably bartlett. scott's was overripe and dripped all over the place but he said it was excellent, and his favourite variety of pear.

so i've gotten to know my pears and i still don't like them as much as apples. my favourite is the homely looking bosc, followed by the shinseiko. my least favourite was the yali. i like peas, but don't like my fruit to taste like them so i'd never buy the chinese golden again no matter how pretty it is.

i still haven't tried a slough of asian pears and i haven't had butter, comice, forelle, red, packam or seckle. i have a d'anjou waiting for me though so i will leave this rivetting blog entry at that.

ps. "pirate" and "beer" are still alive and well.

spaghetti squash

i made spaghetti squash for the first time tonight. it was delicious and i ate a ton of it and now i feel a little squashed-out. everything tastes so squashy...

you know those words that you say or type and then sit and think about for a while because they just seem really wrong? squash is one of them. what an odd word.

scott does this thing in the office where he will say a random word and then i'll tell a story about it and i know that it's one of the things he does to make fun of me, and me knowing that is all part of the joke, but i really love it because i'm a huge fan of stream of consciousness and self-deprecation. hence that run-on sentence. anyway, now i have a story about squash to go with my story about cantaloup. seriously, ask me about cantaloup sometime.