Cooking from itch

I've only mentioned my pasta machine once here, I think, but it's proved to be one of the more heavily-used of the kitchen gadgets I possess. One thing I really like about it is the ability to mix flours so that I get a light wholemeal pasta. I've always found 100% wholewheat pasta to be too stodgy, whereas white pasta just doesn't fill us up for very long. It's a similar story with bread, although I use a different mix of flours with pasta. With my bread I usually make it half-wholemeal, half-white. When it comes to pasta I prefer a mix that's a quarter-wholemeal, three-quarters white.

Tonight I made spaghetti bolognese. Yes, it does take a bit longer, making the pasta first, but not as long as you'd think, with the machine doing most of the work.

I used one of the frozen batches of tomato sauce made from the greenhouse tomatoes, bulked up with carrots I'd harvested from the garden last weekend. Our onion crop was disappointing this year, so it contained store-bought onions, but at least the herbs were fresh from the garden. I steamed a few spinach leaves and sugar snap peas from the greenhouse over the boiling pasta and that was that. Feel like I've come a long way from the days when most of a meal like this would have come out of a packet, jar or tin.

The phrase 'cooking from itch' isn't mine, I should add. I heard it the day I bought the pasta machine at the yard sale and have been meaning to use it ever since!

Overwintering herbs

I've had mixed luck with keeping herbs alive over the winter. Thyme, sage, mint, and oregano seem to survive fine in the border next to the house and parsley usually comes back well in the spring. Plants like rosemary and French tarragon which would have survived over winter outside in England are less likely to do so here, so need some winter protection. The first winter, I dug up the rosemary plant and put it in the basement. Where I promptly forgot about it and it died of dehydration rather than cold. In the following year I took cuttings from its replacement and kept them in the kitchen, where I did remember to water them and they lived until the following year although the parent plant, left outside, did not. Last year, the rosemary plant I left outside did actually make it through the winter, although the smaller plants I kept in the kitchen did not. I'm just not good at remembering to water indoor plants...

But I am persevering and have taken four cuttings from the surprise survivor of last winter. I'm keeping these next to the kitchen sink in the hope that this will prompt me to water them more regularly...

Then I remembered the French tarragon plant I bought this year. I like tarragon but it's one of those annoying plants that can't be grown from seed, so I had to buy it from one of the local nurseries. I left it in its pot, thinking that it would be easier to bring it indoors in the winter that way. I went outside to find it and was rather disheartened by what I saw:

There are some small signs of life (if you look very hard), so I've brought it indoors anyway in the hope that a spell in the warmth of the kitchen will effect a minor miracle and bring it back to full health. Gardening is all about optimism, after all...

On borrowed time

It's been quiet around here because I've been away on a work trip to the UK. Coming back from such a trip at this time of year, I'm never sure whether the summer vegetables will have been killed by a frost or not.

This time we've been lucky and the tender veg in the greenhouse are still hanging on, despite a few frosts which have killed the tender plants outside.

Over the next week I'll be doing a big harvest of all the remaining tomatoes and peppers before we start getting into the really cold weather. Fortunately, there's no frost forecast in the short term, so this is not as urgent a task as it might have been.

The fall pea experiment in the greenhouse has partially worked. I picked a good harvest of sugar snap peas today but the regular peas ('Lincoln') on the right of this photo have not been quite so successful, despite good germination rates.

I'll probably just sow the sugar snap ones next year - but it was definitely worth trying.

The chickens are still laying which is interesting because this time last year we didn't get any eggs at all. We're only getting two or three a day now, but there were none for three weeks last year between October and November. Strange...

Citizens

Forty-two new citizens took the oath of citizenship in Belleville today and four of them were our family. There were 18 countries represented in the group and it seemed that England was the supplier of the largest number, with about nine of us in all (there were also two Scots, so a fairly good showing by the UK!). The ceremony had everything necessary: a convivial presiding official (Roy Bonisteel), civic dignitaries, bilingual proceedings, lots of maple leaves and, of course, a Mountie. We swore our Oath of Citizenship (which involved promising to obey the laws of Canada and "to be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second"), received our Certificates of Citizenship and then sang 'O Canada'.

We came away clutching bags of Canadian swag (I am never going to be short of Canadian flags) and feeling, on the whole, quite proud and happy.

Cider apple experiment

I don't know what I'm doing wrong with the orchard, but I'm not having a lot of luck with it. Last year we had no fruit and this year the only tree to produce anything was one of the cider apple varieties (Brown's apple). I had about six apples from it, total weight 1 lb 4 oz. Hardly impressive.

And now I had a problem: six apples is hardly enough to make cider from. I could have used them to make apple juice, but at the moment I don't have an apple press of any kind. I couldn't work out whether cider apples are good for anything much else apart from making juice. This post is by way of a public service in case there's anyone else out there wondering the same thing.

I decided to take a chance and turn them into apple strudel. I took the precaution of tasting the raw apple first and it was surprisingly sweet. I'd been expecting them to be more like a Bramley cooking apple than an eating apple and thought I'd have to add a fair bit of sugar to them to compensate. After being cooked in the strudel, they did disintegrate to mush in a way that a Bramley wouldn't - but they tasted very good and I would certainly use them in cooking again.

I still harbour hopes that one day in the future I'll get a crop that's big enough for me to be able to justify the investment in a small cider press, but this year all I have to show from the orchard is this single apple strudel.

Dream scenes

Just recently I've been having a lot of dreams where I'm taking photographs. Seems odd - my mind conjuring up a scene and then trying to record it. I'm obviously taking too many, though, because the other night, the batteries in my dream camera ran out...

I don't know if the dreams mean that I'm taking too many photos in my waking hours, or too few, but I woke to the promise of a misty dawn, the sort of weather that usually provides great photo opportunities and I was up like a shot, heading to the lake to see what it looked like.

Quite lovely, of course, but the water in the air transforms even the most workaday views: the silos and the stubble of the corn in next door's field:

Our big barn:

And a tuft of Canada thistle caught in the chicken-wire fence:

Closet photography

It's not often that I get compelled to take a photograph upon entering a toilet cubicle. But yesterday was one of those days. The (slightly eerie?) combination of the frosted glass window, tendrils of living and dead creeper was crying out to be recorded.

That time of year...

...when the harvest is gathered in...

...when chickens lose their feathers...

...when leaves begin to change...

... and when I'm back to wearing jeans and my three-season boots.

The flaw in the door

As we had a spare door after the bathroom work was finished, Mike thought he'd replace Child2's bedroom door with it. A few problems with one of the old hinges and one or two curse words later, the door was in place.

Here it is, fully closed up.

Turns out the bathroom door was two inches narrower than this bedroom door. So perhaps not such a good idea after all. We tried selling the improved ventilation angle to Child2 but he wasn't impressed. His old door is now back in its original place.

This house never stops surprising us with its little idiosyncrasies...

At the County fair

Some of the sights at the County Fair were what I was expecting. Beautiful vegetables:

And shiny fruit:

The Demolition Derby was a new experience for me, though. I do vaguely remember seeing banger racing in England as a child, but that was an actual race around a track. This was more brutal: like the dodgems but with real cars, played out in what seems to be a very small field of battle. The driver of the last car still capable of moving wins.

In theory, I disapprove of this form of entertainment: it's dangerous and not at all environmentally friendly.

But there's no denying that there is something thrilling about watching people deliberately crashing cars into each other. The crowd gets really involved, with lots of cheering for particularly spectacular collisions. I can see why this has become a standard part of county fairs in North America.

I feel a little guilty about enjoying it, that's all...

Bright spots

The last few days have been dull, cool, windy and altogether back-to-schoolish. As I type, the setting sun has made an appearance, but we haven't seen much of it recently.

There are some cheering sights around, though. At last we're getting a corn crop that people other than myself will eat. The multi-coloured variety is interesting. It's called 'Rainbow Inca Sweet'. Personally I feel it's somewhat lacking in the green and orange department for a name like that.

The goldenrod has been flowering for a few weeks now and the asters are just starting to open up to keep them company.

Pig-ugly

I'm conscious that I usually share the tourist-brochure view of Prince Edward County in these posts. Just for a little balance, here I'm treating you to a glimpse of a candidate for 'Most Ugly Building of the County'. I stopped to take its likeness yesterday on one of my bike-excursions:

A true monstrosity: unattractive grey bricks, awful windows (if that's the right word for them) and a general appearance of a high-security prison for the most dangerous pigs in the world.

School days

Child#1 is embarking on her first year of high school next week and she spent part of yesterday at an orientation session at her new school, picking up a lock, student card and her schedule for the year. I took one looked the schedule and went "Huh?". Maybe not the most eloquent of speeches, but that document really confused me. Partly because it seemed to be written in code (I'm sure she's looking forward to her first lesson of PPL101b, for example), but mostly because it was so simple. For the first five months of the school year she will have the same four classes every day. Then in the rest of the year, she'll have a different four classes.

Each day of the week exactly the same and only four different classes: this is the 'semester system' and it seems very strange to me. I imagine it makes timetabling a lot easier, but it does sound rather monotonous. And odd not to be doing a core subject like English, French or Mathematics for half of a year! When I think back to my timetable for the same age (13/14), I had 13 different subjects (and 12 separate exams at the end of that year (now I'm feeling hard-done-by)). Seems like the kids specialise very early here. Will be interesting to see how it works out.

Taking the test

We reached another stage in our emigration journey today.

This imposing building is the immigration office in Kingston, where Mike and I reported earlier this afternoon to establish our identities, prove we could speak English - bit tricky for Mike, that one, but he seemed to manage OK ;-) - and complete a 20-question multiple-choice test on Canadian history, geography, economics and politics. It was fine. The questions were straight-forward and we were in and out of the building in one hour. There were only ten of us taking the test and curiously, Mike was the only man. We all had a bit of a chat before the test started and heard some horror stories from one of the women whose family had taken the test in Toronto, where there were many more people and it took three hours to interview them all before the test started.

When we got home, the children proudly presented us with a cake that they'd made to mark the occasion:

Hidden by the generous helping of sprinkles are the words 'Nice Job' and a thumbs-up. Good to know that they have confidence in our abilities!

We won't know for sure whether we've passed the test until we hear from the immigration office. If we have, then we'll be invited to a ceremony with a citizenship judge in September. Fingers crossed...

We're thinking we will have a party to mark the transition to officially being Canadians. It will be quite nice not to have to read the 'Discover Canada' book again: we've been having to learn the whole thing over the last few weeks. And we are comprehensively Sick To Death of it.

Shooting up

Thought it was time for an update on the chicks that our broody hen hatched in June. They are growing well and at eight weeks old they look like proper chickens, albeit about half the size of a regular bird. The broody got bored of them at five weeks old and is back with the other hens now. The chicks are still in a separate enclosure during the day, as they are too small to run with the big hens. I let them out in the evening, once the adults are shut up for the night, to give them a run outside and a chance to have a dust bath and peck at grass shoots.

This photo shows the young cockerel. He's beginning to crow in the mornings, now. Well, 'crow' is a grand word for the noise he makes. If you imagine a chicken trying to sing the first three notes of 'Three Blind Mice' then you might get an idea of how it sounds.

In the greenhouse I'm starting to think about sowing seeds for late crops. I've never had any luck with direct sowings of peas in there in the spring: they always get eaten by rodents before they get a chance to germinate - I have to sow them indoors and transplant them. I wasn't optimistic about a later sowing, but was proved wrong when all the pea seeds germinated this week within a few days of being sown.

Whether they have time to produce a crop of peas before the winter is another matter, of course, but there's no harm in trying!

Side-road scenes

I usually think of the tree-webs of the fall web worm as rather disfiguring. But with the early-morning sun shining through them, they're transformed into something more magical:

I've been meaning to take a picture of this building for a while now. It's a transplanted church which is now part of the Closson Chase vineyard. Its unusual roof design is a tribute to the fifteenth-century Hospices de Beaune in Burgundy, famous for its vineyards. Closson Road is the core of Prince Edward County's wine region - there is just one vineyard after another as you travel down it.

On my ride this morning I turned off Closson Road and took the Millennium Trail back to Lake Consecon. I paused a few times to take photos. The subject of this next one literally stopped me in my tracks.

I think it's a Nannyberry (Viburnum lentago). Aren't those berries beautiful?

 Back when I visited the Art Gallery of Ontario in February, I decided that my favourite Canadian painting of those on display was this one by Franklin Carmichael of Cranberry Lake:

I was rather taken aback then, this morning, to be confronted with a very similar view on my bike ride: a hidden cluster of flooded trees.

I also found this single red maple leaf on the path. I'm going to take it as a good omen for the Canadian citizenship test that Mike and I will be taking next week...

Suffocating squash bugs

As soon as the title of this post came into my mind, it was swiftly followed by the phrase 'sufferin' succotash' - as used by Sylvester the cat and Daffy Duck. Succotash is a dish of corn and beans and my problem was with the other Three Sisters crop: squash. To be even more specific, it was with the cucumber branch of the cucurbit family. The greenhouse and garden cucumber plants have been completely polished off this year. Here's what's left of the cucumber plants (including the inevitable overgrown-pickling-cucumber-I-missed):

And here are the little pests that have done the damage:

Now normally I adopt a 'live and let live' approach to pests, reckoning that eventually the balance of nature will reassert itself and something will come along that eats the pests. But the force of numbers here was too great and my one remaining squash plant (not even sure what it is, to be honest, but I wanted a chance to find out) was in danger of being overwhelmed.

The organic-ish solution was to mix some dish detergent with water and spray the mixture on the bugs. I thought the chickens might be interested in helping, but the two I brought into the greenhouse last night were only interested in nibbling at the lettuce and peppers, despite there being bugs all over the bed. I gave up on that approach and reverted to plan A. The dish detergent mixture  works (the solution stops the bugs from breathing), although I can see that it will take a while before the bug numbers are brought down to a more manageable populations.

Busy Sunday

After being out for much of Saturday, today was one of those racing-to-catch-up sort of Sundays. Tomorrow, work starts on replacing our bathroom and there was a lot of preparation and general tidying up I wanted to do (the new bathroom is going to take part of Child1's closet, so we had to get her room organised, too). Everyone mucked in, though, and it feels like we're making progress.

The bathroom has been on the 'to do' list for a while. I think it is the same age as the house: early 1970s, and it looks it. I can't bear to put a big picture of it up, so here's a small one. You can see that the suite is a very 1970s shade of pale brown. Not sure if there was an official name for this - I know that the downstairs toilet we had was called 'Harvest Gold' (a shade that can best be described as vomit-yellow*).

The basin in the current bathroom is metal and has several rusty patches on it, while the toilet uses a Niagara Falls-like quantity of water each time it's flushed. The whole room is a bit of an embarrassment and it had got to the point where we replaced it or we turned it into a museum of the 1970s bathroom. It'll be great to get it finished, even though it will be annoying in the short-term while the work is being done.

In between cleaning and tidying up I had to do something with the ridiculous number of tomato peppers we've been picking. The chicken manure I added to the greenhouse beds has created our biggest crop ever of these.

Luckily, they're easy to deal with. I just cut off the tops, remove the seeds (some of which I keep for next year's crop), cut the peppers in half and put them in freezer bags. I use a drinking straw to suck out the air, which helps them keep for longer.

We ate the huitlacoche (a.k.a. corn smut) today. I cooked it with some onion, garlic and part of a cayenne pepper, then used the mixture to fill burritos. Well, 'fill' is the wrong word (there wasn't enough for that), so I topped it off with grated mozzarella cheese before cooking the burritos. They tasted fine: a cross between mushrooms and corn. The children refused to touch them, but Mike was willing enough. I don't think he ever checks up on what I'm feeding him, to see if I'm telling the truth about whether it's edible or not. He'd be awfully easy to poison...

*Sorry.

Dragon boats

Mike had been roped in to joining one of the community teams for today's dragon boat racing event in Wellington, so we spent much of the day down at the waterfront there, watching the competition. There were 11 teams, a mixture of local dragon boat clubs, community teams and breast cancer survivor groups from as far afield as Kingston and Toronto.

After the heats, the breast cancer groups held a ceremony to remember those who had not survived the disease. Pink carnations were thrown in the water in memory of friends and loved ones.

The Rotary team Mike was on won the community team cup. It looked like incredibly hard work!

Corn smut

When you go to check on the corn growing in your garden and discover it looking like this:

...the first thought that enters your head (I'm guessing) isn't likely to be 'Ooh, how delicious!'. I stared at these in dismay, wondering what on earth had gone wrong this time.

A little research later and I discovered that appearances had been deceptive. This fungus-infected corn is an ancient delicacy, known in Mexico as huitlacoche. It's been rebranded 'Mexican truffle' in the rest of North America, to distract attention from its more usual farm name of corn smut. Which, you have to admit, doesn't sound all that tasty.

 I'm not sure that anyone else in the house will join me in trying them, but supper for me tonight is going to include some of these. Perhaps if I sell it to the others as an Aztec delicacy I might get a few takers...

Apparently it comes in cans, too. And looks even less appealing that way...