Almond macaroons

I associate macaroons with Enid Blyton books and they're not something I've ever made before. But today I had two leftover egg whites and went hunting on the Internet for inspiration. David Lebovitz came to my rescue. I'm already a fan of his, thanks to his ice cream book The Perfect Scoop. He suggested macaroons as one way of using them up. I've always thought macaroons were made with desiccated coconut, which I don't much like, but a bit more hunting around brought up recipes for an almond variety, which sounded preferable.

There seem to be as many variations on the recipe online as there are recipes: oven temperature, method, quantities all seemed to be different in each version I read.

In the end I settled for an amalgam of several: as usual, opting for the most simple method and ingredients.

Ingredients

2 egg whites
1 cup ground almonds
¾ cup sugar
½ tsp almond extract (optional, I just happened to have some)

Whisk the egg whites to the soft peak stage. Gently fold in the almonds, sugar and almond extract (if using). Spoon the mixture into mounds onto a parchment-paper-lined baking sheet and bake at 400°F/200°C for 15 minutes. This quantity made 12 macaroons.

My end result wasn't the classic smooth, domed macaroon you'd get if you piped the mixture. But the taste and chewy texture are wonderful. And you don't leave half the mixture behind in the piping bag.

My Internet browsing brought up the fact that macaroons have become a traditional Passover treat, which wasn't something I knew (and which I'm finding hard to reconcile with the Enid Blyton association I had before, if I'm honest). They're certainly very quick to make - so a perfect food for Passover (or any time - I'll definitely be making these again).

I'm glad the macaroons turned out well, because I used the yolks of the same eggs to make a hollandaise sauce. Which was a complete failure. Ho hum.

Froggie wooing

It's frog season, all of a sudden. I was startled when this leopard frog leapt out at me in the greenhouse this evening. Walking up to the pond shortly afterwards, I was even more surprised to hear the frog chorus that was going on up there.

This is our fourth spring here, but this is the first time that I've heard Spring Peeper frogs in full song. It is deafening, especially when you consider that these frogs are less than an inch in length.

And while I'm on the subject of aquatic creatures,a new one has taken up residence in the ditch at the front of our property. It took us a while to work out what it was (it's very camera-shy), but we finally realised that the medium-sized furry beast lurking there is a muskrat. You can just see it in the bottom right corner of the picture below - but, like I said, it doesn't like having its photo taken!

Unexpected lettuce

I remember sowing the blood-veined sorrel on the left in one of the greenhouse raised beds, towards the end of the growing season in 2010. But all that lettuce that's coming up on the right? I don't have any recollection of sowing that. In fact, I'm fairly sure I didn't. The even more weird thing is that exactly the same surprise appearance of lettuce happened last spring, in the same bed. Not that I'm complaining - it's a welcome sight!

Lemon Polenta Cake

I know, I know: I don't post for a week and then two posts in one day. But I couldn't pass up sharing this find. It's from Nigella Lawson's latest book, Kitchen, which up until now hasn't really given me a lot of inspiration. I was flicking through it this morning, looking for ideas for a Sunday-lunch dessert and came across this cake. I love anything lemony and am also very fond of cakes containing almonds. This (recipe here) has both, so had to be a winner.

Judging by the way it disappeared, I'm not the only one who thought it was wonderful.

Now the only problem is, who's going to get a third taste? It's the cook's prerogative, right?

Snakes alive

It's warming up a bit, and all the snow has gone, at last. One sure sign of warmer weather is when we start to see garter snakes basking on the path and in the border at the front of the house. Yesterday there was a whole heap of them enjoying the sunshine just in front of our garage door:

I've never seen quite so many together at one time!

I got everyone working outside yesterday morning. Child#1 tidied up the front border, while Child#2, my mother-in-law and I worked together in a small production line, potting on the tomato plants. It was lovely and warm in the greenhouse. The plant labels are another good bit of recycling: the children have a bit of a lollipop/popsicle habit, so I keep the sticks, boil them to sterilise them and then re-use them as labels for the plants. They look better than plastic labels, I think, and are easy to write on (as long as they're dry) with a sharp pencil.

It's not warm when she's away

A bit of an understatement, that: it's been blooming freezing here in my absence. There's still some ice on the lake and a few patches of snow on the ground.

In the greenhouse, many of the seedlings look exactly the same as they did when I left, with the exception of the peas, which seem to have put on at least a bit of growth.

I sowed the tomatoes earlier than usual, knowing that I'd be away, and they've germinated and are looking good.

So, now I'm back, it would be quite nice if things could heat up a bit outside, please.

Country walk

One thing I do miss about living in England is the enormous number of public rights of way and country paths between towns and villages. Where we live in Canada there are lots of trails, but they haven't evolved over centuries in the same way that the paths in England have: they tend to be limited to parks and nature conservation areas.

One of our favourite activities when we lived in England was to go off on a country walk somewhere. And if the walk was circular and had a pub at some point, then all the better. We quite often used to get lost, but that was part of the fun.

I had a day without meetings today, so went off for a walk with my dad at lunchtime. We hiked along part of the Greensand Ridge Walk, ending up at the Globe Inn beside the Grand Union Canal.

A couple of swans were on patrol:

We got slightly lost a couple of times, as is traditional. On the way back, we came through Knolls Wood, which has an amazing avenue of Monkey Puzzle (Araucaria araucana trees. I'm not very fond of these trees, as a rule, but the sight of so many, all in one place, was quite striking.

Hot stuff

I'm going to be away for a couple of weeks, so I've had to compress a lot of garden-related jobs into the last two weekends. On Saturday we tackled the chicken coop, carting out ten wheelbarrow-loads of litter and giving the floor and perches a good scrape and clean. Mike chipped some cedar branches to replace the old litter and it now smells a lot more fragrant in there!

This is a twice-yearly job, September and March. I was a bit more scientific about it this time, making sure that each barrowful got a good soaking of water before adding the next one. It's much more difficult to get the pile properly wet if you add the water at the end (as I found in September).

By this morning (two days later), the temperature inside the heap was reading 54°C/129°F, which is in just about the right range for killing pathogens. The outside temperature was just 3°C/37°F when I took this reading. Yes, that is a cooking thermometer. And no, I don't use it in the kitchen any more. ;-)

The heap will be a bit stinky for a while, as it cooks and then cures. But it's nowhere near the house and I'll miss the worst of it, as I'll be away. I'm no fool...

On the line

First line-drying day of the year. Ten days later than in 2009, I notice. The horizontality of the clothes suggests that I might have been over-keen about achieving this particular Spring milestone. Below the line, the grass is still very brown-looking, but with promises of green showing through.

Rocket/arugula and lettuce seedlings are beginning to emerge in the greenhouse and I've got peppers and eggplants coming up indoors. I sowed the tomatoes on Tuesday and they're sitting under a plastic cover on a sunny windowsill, so I hope they'll germinate pretty quickly. I moved the onion seedlings into the greenhouse this week and also transplanted the first of the peas. I germinated them indoors to avoid the problem I had last year with the seeds being eaten by rodents. There's still a risk that the young plants might get gnawed by rabbits in the greenhouse (if they're still lurking around), but I've given them some basic protection. It's not a rabbit-proof fence, by any means, but it might make them think twice:

Transformations

A hard frost this morning turned clover into cactus

and the skeletons of last year's asters into columns of sparkling light.

Fly-past

A sure sign of Spring:

Ice at sunset

Look, I promise I'll stop taking pictures of bits of ice soon. Indeed, the weather will stop me taking pictures of bits of ice soon.

Although it doesn't look much like it, it is warming up quite fast out there. I was wading in the stream today, taking these photos: something that would have been impossible just a few weeks ago, when the surface of the stream itself was frozen solid.

The climate here seems to take the solstice and equinox dates quite seriously. The lake is generally frozen from 21 December to 21 March, for example, give or take a day or two. And July and August are reliably hot in a way that entirely makes up for the equally reliably cold January and February!

Ice-sketches

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I'm fascinated by ice formations. The first photo I took this morning was of one of the artefacts left behind by the weekend's freezing rain:

Come, let me clutch thee.

Much more interesting, though, were the live ice-pictures being created at the edge of the stream by air entering below the layer of ice. They were just mesmerising:

Wet weekend

Saturday was very damp: two inches/50mm of rain. Not a day when you wanted to spend much time outside. We were beginning to see some patches of brown grass where the snow was starting to melt:

Overnight, the precipitation turned to freezing rain

and then to snow.

Ah well, only two weeks of winter left, so we're told...

Sprouted sprouts

The last stage in sprouting the alfalfa seeds is to spread them out and let them sit in sunshine for 15 minutes. The weather today is obligingly clear.

Look good, don't they? I'd have done this sooner if I'd realised how easy it was...

A cunning plan

Every year that I've grown members of the cabbage family, there's been some cock-up with the labelling and I've been left with a series of mighty similar-looking young plants which could be broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, sprouts or kale. Which means that I fail to give the cauliflower the loving attention it demands once it is transplanted into the soil, because I don't know which one of the mystery brassicas it is.

I was therefore feeling very pleased with myself today, when I sowed the seeds in rows in their greenhouse nursery bed and photographed the seed packets next to the corresponding row. Hah, I thought, this year I won't be fooled. I'll have proof of which is which!

But then I remembered that this year I'm not growing cauliflower. So it doesn't really matter. Sigh.

Year of the Rabbit

You might think that the depths of winter would be fairly quiet on the destructive-animal-pest front in the garden. There isn't anything growing at this time of year for them to eat, after all.

It was such a beautiful morning here that I decided it was time to bring the greenhouse out of its winter hibernation mode and sow some seeds in there. The soil was warm, dry, and teeming with centipedes. Mike reconnected the water supply and I got to work, sowing carrots, beets, rocket, spinach and some lettuce and pak choi seeds in one of the beds. The dead-looking leaves in the corners are last year's parsley plants, which don't look very lively at the moment, but should burst back into abundant growth soon.

We had some high winds last week which blew out one of the small panels in the corner of the greenhouse.

I hadn't really given it a lot of thought, apart from adding it to the mental 'tasks to be done' list. The panel is nowhere to be found, so it's going to be a case of finding something suitable to plug the gap.

What I hadn't considered is that this gives a handy entrance to the greenhouse for winter-starved creatures. When I started watering one of the other beds, evidence of their activity was all too clear:

They'd been feasting on the last of my over-wintered carrots:

So suddenly it's become quite a priority to get that entrance hole fixed. Otherwise word will spread that I'm running a nice little rabbit restaurant and the plants from all the seeds I sowed this morning will be feeding Flopsy, Mopsy, Peter and Cotton-tail instead of us.

Sometimes I think Mr McGregor got a bad rap.

Sprouts

I found some instructions on how to sprout alfafla seeds on Saturday. I started the process off and was pleased to see that on Sunday afternoon many of the seeds were already sending out small roots:

It works!

Seedy Saturday

There's a seed-swapping event going on today in Picton. I've never been to one before, so wasn't sure about how they worked. But taking seeds seemed to be a key part of the whole concept, so I spent some time this morning bagging up some of the parsley, dill and coriander seeds I collected from the greenhouse herbs last summer.

There was a long table at the event, with different containers for different categories of seeds. I deposited my collection in the 'herb' basket and was then free to browse the others. I came away with some Dakota Black Popcorn, Green Arrow peas and a packet of Nicotiana sylvestris.

See those brown envelopes? They're just made from single sheets of paper. I felt bad about my seeds in their plastic bags when I saw them - I think they're great. Maybe next year...

There were seed vendors there, too, with a wide range of seeds for sale. I couldn't resist a packet of alfalfa seeds: I've been meaning to have a go at growing some seeds for sprouting for ages. Child#2 was given a packet of mixed sunflowers by the lady at the Edith Fox Life and Loss Centre's table and I listened to Vicki Emlaw of Vicki's Veggies give an interesting talk about the concept of seed sovereignty and how to go about saving lettuce seeds.

I'm glad I went along. Now I need to do some research to find out how best to sprout these alfalfa seeds...

Early start

A dentist's appointment at 8am had the children and me on the road early this morning. We were rewarded with sparkling trees and bushes, coated with hoar frost. Not sure that these photos do it justice, though.

Boo

I keep forgetting that I need to shut the cupboard doors these days.

Chickens out

The cold and the depth of snow have kept the poor chickens confined to their coop for much of the last month-and-a-half.

With a few days of above-freezing temperatures at last, enough snow had melted to reveal some small patches of grass for them to eat today. It's been such a contrast to last winter, when they were out in the orchard much more often. I love seeing them scratching and pecking about outside.

Powerless

Last May I wrote a short post about how we're sponsoring Mike's mother to come and live with us here. We knew it was going to be a long wait before she would come out: parents and grandparents are not a priority for the immigration service.

Today's news about immigration rates is not good for our family and many others like us. There are 140,000 people in the parents-and-grandparents queue, it seems, and now they are only going to allow 11,000 in, each year. At this rate, it will be more than 10 years before our family will be reunited.

It's so frustrating and upsetting. A lot of new immigrants have no vote (ourselves included), so it's an easy way for the government to save money without losing the good opinion of voters. Indeed, reading the comments on that CBC article would suggest that this move is popular with many Canadians, who see immigration as a problem and people like my mother-in-law as a potential burden on the state.

All we want to do is offer my children's grandmother a place in our new life and the comfort of having her only family members around her. Apparently, it's too much to ask.

Growing

The snow drifts are still getting bigger.

But so are the lettuce seedlings on the windowsill in the living room.

I am beginning to get tired of the snow, but not enough to stop taking pictures of it yet!

It'll come in useful, one day

My parents had one of those fundamental personality differences in relation to 'stuff'. I think it's like the cat person/dog person distinction. Dad's tendency is always to keep a thing in case it might be useful, whereas Mum had more of a 'chuck it' mentality. My sympathies were with Mum, generally, and I am usually fairly ruthless in trying to keep the number of my possessions to a minimum.

This little trug is an exception. I received it as a Christmas present from a colleague, ooh, probably about 10 years ago now. It contained some hand-cream and hand-scrub for gardeners. It's too small to be of much use in harvesting garden produce, but I've always kept it, as it seemed too nice to throw away and I thought that maybe, one day, I would come up with a use for it.

Now we're getting a respectable number of eggs, that day has come, at last.

Temporary installation

Art Gallery of Ontario: first impressions

It's hard to do justice to a gallery or museum on a first visit - there's always far too much to see and my legs always give up before I feel I've done the place justice. My overall impression of the AGO was positive, and my response to the physical space that was the Galleria Italia (below) was one of 'Wow!'.

I had time to visit the current exhibition on the Maharajas (worth seeing for the amazing restored Cartier diamond and ruby necklace towards the end, alone (the photo in that article doesn't do it justice)), the Canadian artists section, most of the European section on level 2 and the ship models in the basement. These are watched over by a splendid lion figurehead. Which I wasn't allowed to photograph and which isn't online anywhere, so you'll just have to imagine it. You can see highlights of the Canadian Collection on the gallery's website. It's a shame that you can't click from one image to the next, rather than having to go back to the list all the time, but at least you can see some of the artworks without having to visit Toronto.

My favourite piece of art in the Canadian section was Franklin Carmichael's Cranberry Lake (1931) - the way he's captured the sun on the water and the eerie shapes of the dead trees in the foreground. In the European section the image which caught my attention the most was James Tissot's The Shop Girl
- I love the tangle of ribbons on the counter. I was also fascinated by the carved items in the Thomson Collection - some of them quite macabre, such as the rosary pendant showing a skull being eaten by worms and lizards. The incredibly intricate wooden carvings in prayer beads were also amazing - such detailed work in such a tiny space.

I paid a visit to the basement café, which was rather a disappointment after the rest of the gallery. Like having a cup of tea in someone's basement, in fact. I think they could have made it a more interesting space. But, perhaps, as so often happens, the money ran out before the basement could be properly finished. ;-)

More white things

The promised storm left us with some impressive snow drifts yesterday. The tractor's snow-blowing attachment hasn't seen a lot of use this winter, but it was proving handy this morning. Yesterday was the first Wednesday when I haven't driven to Deseronto because of the weather. In our first winter I drove through a few storms like that (they always seem to happen on a Wednesday), determined not to be thought of as wimpish and probably giving myself a few more grey hairs in the process. These days I'm more sensible.

The dog disturbed an animal in the barn yesterday - all I saw of it was its tail, which was rather like a cat's in shape and size, white with a black tip. It hid in the woodpile before I could get a better look at it. At first I thought it was a cat, but a bit of hunting around on Wikipedia suggests that it was a stoat in its white winter coat. Which is ermine, of course. Nice to see it on the animal instead of trimming someone's robes. Not that I spend an awful lot of time with nobles in full regalia, it has to be said. If the stoat's going to eat the rats and mice in the barn, then I'm quite happy - but I am worried about the chickens...

Talking of pests, I had to do a bit of snow-clearing myself. While Mike was negotiating the tractor around one of the trees at the back of the house, the blowing snow hit the back door, forcing it open. Our utility room rapidly filled up with snow:

Mike's slippers were one of the main casualties. Which I feel is a suitable penalty for making me shovel snow indoors.

This evening, Mother Nature is the one doing the snow blowing: