Training to Live

i had an extra long labour day weekend because of my work schedule and since we’d planned to have a bunch of friends up to the cottage that weekend anyway (the cottage is about a 3 hour drive away from here), we figured we’d make an entire week of it. as luck would have it, the weather didn’t really cooperate. it was cold and rainy all weekend long. after our friends left and we enjoyed the one sunny/warm day there was going to be, jon and i hightailed it to his parents’ farm, about 30 minutes away from their cottage, for the rest of the week. although the farm isn’t home for me, it sure feels like it.

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we didn’t have the relaxing week we originally planned (thanks, weather), it was wonderful to be at the farm anyway, as always. we ate loads of good super fresh, local food, worked hard at putting veggies away in the freezer for the winter [a great big pot of ultra veggified pasta sauce (which i'm calling my 500 metre sauce, since everything we put in it came from within 500 metres of the kitchen we cooked it in!, 2 gallons of crushed/stewed tomatoes for making chili with this week (and oh what chili we made this week!!! at least 17 quarts put away in the freezer), and a bushel of red peppers chopped up and frozen]. we went to a small town country fair, played with kittens, watched movies (and napped) and it was good.

i think this photo (taken on my iphone with the super fun ShakeIt app) really captures the beauty of the country (big open blue sky), fall, and the colourful energy of the fair. shortly after i took this, i proceeded to eat a big bag of cotton candy. ohhhhh was my tummy ever not happy about that! (it was certainly enjoyable to eat, however). i’d never been happier to see vegetables again.

we came back to regular-old-at-home life for a week, but come monday, the craziness begins again. i am flying off to the great city of winnipeg for a work conference and then immediately after i come back, i have a half marathon to run! my training over the last few weeks has been pretty abysmal (i blame the weather again.) i’m sure i’ll make it through, even if not super quickly! i’ve been to winnipeg once before, but only very briefly (i flew into their airport and had lunch at a quizno’s before driving out northwest to a wedding. not so exciting) so i’m hoping to have a bit of exploration time.

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in other, more creative news, i have been working on a lot of projects, art and otherwise. sadly nothing concrete to share yet though! in august i got an email about a super fun sounding workshop that one of my favourite bloggers (elise) was running on how to make minibooks (like a scrapbook but on a smaller physical scale {hence the “mini”} and with a much more casual concentrated or super stretched out approach). my dining table is covered in all kinds of fun new supplies so i can start making and doing. the workshop was 2 weeks long and i learned tons of neat tricks and ideas.

also, another favourite blogger (kal) is running a different kind of workshop right now, which i am also signed up for. it is called “nurture your creativity and be bulletproof”. i’ve been through a bunch of stuff at work over the past year and a half that i really could have been a bit more bulletproof for (who couldn’t!) so i figured the class would be more than useful just for that. the nurturing my creativity bit is a bonus and pairs perfectly with elise’s class that just wrapped up. i am really looking forward to the next 4 weeks!

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last month i finally joined the twenty-first century and ditched my ultra crappy super old pay as you go plan cellphone, which had a battery that only lasted a day (without use) and no other redeeming features (which meant that it was usually left at home, battery uncharged, with no paid time on it! not so useful). i bit the bullet and got an iphone4 (expensive but SO LOVELY), which i guess i was lucky enough to score right when they were released to canada – everyone is out of stock now. having the internet in my pocket has made things so fun and easy! i plan to do a lot more on the fly adventure blogging, once i find a good app for this. any recommendations? i’m signed up for posterous, so i might go that route, but it would have to be separate from Training to Live here. the wordpress app has left me unimpressed (photos only at the end of the text? no thanks!).

other favourite apps so far:

teuxdeux (amazing amazing. i went through a whole bunch of to do type apps before i settled on this one. i love that you can have multiple accounts. and that it automatically pushes everything you didn’t do today onto tomorrow. i also love that you can go back and see what you did on any given day. and that you can assign tasks into any day in the future). also it automatically syncs with the web version, so you can enter everything on your computer at home and have it with you on the go.

doodle jump – super fun and a great game to play when you’re staying put for a bit. i just downloaded tetris for an alternative for my upcoming trips.

shakeIt – just like your old favourite polaroids

mobile banking

mindbody (so i know what yoga classes are being offered where, RIGHT NOW). i’ve been missing from yoga since june and i’ve made a pledge to myself to try and get to class at least once or twice a week.

starbucks (mostly to seek out free wifi. when i was in chicago last month and didn’t have roaming data, i discovered that just being in the vicinity of a starbucks would give me the internet. it was awesome. plus, you never know when you’ll need a pumpkin spice fix! this is good for being in new cities). also, for newbs to the ‘bucks, you can create your own drinks!

alarm clock pro – my alarm clock that i’ve used for the last 5 years recently stopped working (sort of) and i have since been trying to find a good replacement that wouldn’t set me back a ton of money. i came up short. until the day i decided to try out alarm clock pro, for the low low price of 0.99$, it is everything i’ve ever wanted in an alarm clock without a) having to spend a ton of money and b) adding more crap to my night stand. perfect.

and of course, tweetdeck. i still heart twitter!

what apps do you go to?

yesterday we attended the funeral of a 24 year old young woman. heart heavy sadness. as with funerals (and weddings), it brought a lot of family together, and i did have the chance to meet many wonderful people from jon’s side. if only the circumstances were lighter… it was a nice service, anyway, and though i never had the chance to meet melanie during her all-too-short life, it seemed to do her spirit right. many happy memories were shared.

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jon’s parents sent us home with a trunkload of farm goods: a big bag of yellow and green beans, a sack of new potatoes, beets, zukes, a jar of blueberries and a big basket of red tomatoes. my own little garden patch is bountiful (even a little out of control) with tomatoes, peppers and varied herbs (basil, mostly). i decided that a big pot of pasta sauce would be a delicious way to use up many of the tomatoes and some other vegetables and be a great excuse to try out my newest toy: (whilst at the same time, crossing one thing off of my mighty life list, which i know, i haven’t quite posted my own yet. it’s coming)

the pasta express! it has 12 different attachments for all kinds of different shapes to extrude. it even does pretzels, bagels, and extrusion cookies!

jon’s sister was cleaning up her house last weekend and getting rid of unnecessary clutter. for some reason, this lovely pasta maker fell into that category for her. i happily took it off her hands, since i’ve been wanting to make pasta myself for ages now AND it’s an easy item on the list to cross off! hooray for fun, new (free!) appliances.

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making pasta sauce from scratch is fun, but it can get pretty messy! i basically used this recipe.

first you have to score the tomatoes, so they are easier to peel. i used a mix of romas from my garden, littlish rounds (also from my garden) and the big rounds from the farm. although my plants originally came from the farm, the tomatoes that stayed seem to have grown much bigger!

blanch for a few seconds and dunk in ice water before peeling

squeeze the seeds and goop out into the compost and squish the flesh

onions are required. i don’t like them much, but they cooked long enough to not be noticable.

basil from the yard along with a few cloves of garlique.

cook down and add tomato

add a bit of alcohol. wine is good, but i didn’t have any, so i went with a splash of fortified and then i simmered my sauce.

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we took a break to visit a nearby farmer’s market for some fruit.

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then it was pasta time!

i sadly don’t seem to have any pictures of the plated meal. i guess we ate everything up too quickly! the pasta was delicious. it’s hard for me to say whether or not it is better than bought, since i am obviously biased, but jon seemed to really enjoy it a lot! there will be much more experimenting with this in the future. much more.

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this is part of our veggie patch (before we finished weeding!!!) taken back in may. tomorrow i will try to get a picture of it now so you can see just how crazy the situation is. i literally have tomatoes coming out of my ears, and those pepper and basil plants in the foreground have been engulfed. my vegetables are a great source of happiness in my life right now.

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bike race tomorrow and a 60th anniversary party!

a lot, that’s what.

(warning: very orangey post ahead. i got at least a week’s worth of beta caratene today)

this squash was twice as big as my head! it dwarfed the squash at the grocery store- they looked like miniature toy breeds. my squash was a manly man squash. i have two more, just like it!

it was $2 from the apple orchard we frequent in waterloo. my favourite farmer from my farmer’s market told me he plants squash in the rows between his fruit trees, so i imagine the martins do the same. it’s efficient use of the land. most of their squash go for a dollar each, but these were monster-size, so we paid two. still, what a deal!

first there was soup:

butternut-apple-pear soup. i decided to go with a veggie stock that i made last night instead of my usual chicken broth. i cubed half the squash and put it in a pot with 3-4 pears that were on their last legs and several glugs of apple cider and let it boil away. when everything was nice and tender, i went at it with my favourite immersion blender. for blended soups, there’s no comparison! it is quick, easy and the cleanup is a breeze (compared to a normal blender, which also sometimes is tricky when dealing with hot soup!). along with some crackers and mamapea chickpeas, we called it lunch! i still have half a gallon of soup left over!

with the second half of the squash, i decided to try something completely different. butternut squash crumble. what a novel idea! squash and some tomato instead of apples. parmesan cheese and parsley instead of sugar in the flour/butter crumble topping. brilliant! i won’t be able to report on the taste until tomorrow (jon’s parents are coming over), but it sure smells good and looks gorgeous! i’ll give it one thumb up so far. i found the recipe on twitter from @freerecipeguide which has so far been a pretty good source of interesting food tidbits for me lately. you should check it out.

i still have 3 cups of cubed (uncooked) squash left over – not sure what to do with that yet. maybe some squash butter? squash oats? we’ll seeeee.

i’m going to go do some dishes, throw in some laundry and try and squeeze in some yoga before bed. tomorrow is going to be a big day.

this week’s meal was kind of the opposite of last week, in that it was sadly shared with no one. i tried to make it every bit as delicious though, even though i was just cooking for myself, as too often when it’s just me, i will supper on the random ingredients of what would be a meal without bothering to properly assemble anything onto a plate.

this ended up taking longer than i planned, but i didn’t have much else to do so i didn’t mind a time-intensive meal. i also made a whole pile of dirty dishes!! thank goodness for the dishwasher.

yikes.

the map: green pin on the right – Brockville (onions), dark blue pin – Markham (raspberries), turquoise pin – Richmond Hill (me! bell pepper), yellow pin – Guelph (eggs, zucchini), green pin on left – Innerkip (corn), purple pin – London (wheatberries), red pin – Jordan Station (heirloom tomatoes, peaches)

the raw materials:

red bell pepper, heirloom tomatoes, zucchini, onion (with dirt from the field!), wheatberries, corn on the cob, another tomato

an “extra gros” (extra large, en français) brown free run egg, peach, raspberries that we picked last weekend

process: sautéed veggies (all except bell pepper) until soft and cooked, grilled corn and simmered wheatberries until satisfactorily chewy. shaved corn into pan of veggies, stirred in wheatberries.

dropped the hollowed out bell pepper into some boiling water for a few minutes until it was soft. preheated the oven (well. it was already on from another project), filled the pepper with the stuffing (and topped with some canadian “parmesan” cheese shavings) and put it into the oven to warm through and have the cheese melt.

meanwhile: i peeled and sliced up 6 peaches (no easy task!) and cooked them on the stove for about 10 minutes with some (non-local) sugar, water + some ginger for zing. puréed in the blender, chilled in an ice bath, and then threw into the ice cream maker to create some sorbet.

when you’re as much of an ice cream maker as i am, you often find yourself inundated with egg whites. there are only so many omelettes you can handle (though i may have to have one for an eat local meal!) and angel food cake is a fantastic way to use up a whole bunch (12) at once. only the eggs were local, but i figured since they comprised the biggest volume of the entire recipe, the cake could kind of count as a local dessert. i used this recipe. after the cake had cooled, i cut myself a piece, scooped some sorbet on the side, and sprinkled a few of my remaining unjammed, unfrozen freshly picked raspberries. what an end to my meal! (low fat to boot plus LOADED with protein. this makes up for the lack of protein in my main)

last weekend, in the midst of all our labour day relaxing (a much much needed weekend of rest from a summer’s worth of running around madly), we decided to have another mini farm adventure. we got up bright and early, stopped at our local chez cora’s for some breakfast waffles and hit the u pick farm as soon as it opened for picking (9am). on weekends, the picking rows tend to get really crowded and if you get there too late, you could be out of luck for finding good berries. plus you have to deal with lots of people in and out of your rows and this can sometimes make me cranky!

i tried to get a picture of my awesome picking getup, but apparently clearly failed (see top right). i had a rainbow belt on my (belt-loop-less pants) holding up a white 4L basket with two quart plastic ziploc containers inside the basket leaving both my hands free for picking. i was advised to do this by my expert picker (top left) who managed to get at least twice as many berries as me (hey, he has had more practice!). this is a fantastic trick and i highly recommend you try this out for any kind of berry picking that involves standing up (i’m not sure it would work so well for strawberries). i remembered my ipod, and rocked out to some feist and imogen heap while i piled my baskets full of fruit.

we got about 12 pounds of berries. i froze 5, made a raspberry pie, 7+ jars of jam (4 all raspberry, 3 raspberry/ginger/peach, inspired by bella eats) and kept a couple quarts out for eating (in smoothies, on yogurt, with granola, on top of angel food cake). yum! at $3.50 per pound, this was a whole lot cheaper than buying raspberries from the farmer’s market, where a pint (approximately half a pound) can go for $4-6 depending on the month. frozen raspberries and the jam will keep me happy through the winter until we can go pick again. it was the perfect way to spend a sunny morning.

up until a couple years ago, i never really gave much thought to my food mileage. it wasn’t until i read barbara kingsolver’s animal, vegetable, miracle (one of my all time favourite reads) that i stopped to consider how silly it was that my food was coming and going further than i was. i pledged to eat as locally as i could (i even gave up bananas and avocados for a while) and keep with the seasons. this meant no may strawberries, no matter how tempting those clamshell boxes of red jewels were, no asparagus after june, and no corn until august. it was difficult at first, but when i realized how much more delicious the things i was eating were when they were properly at their peak, it was all worth while. it made my favourite foods more special when i couldn’t have them just any old time i wanted.

sure i am always a little sad when raspberry season ends, but i know that big, juicy niagara peaches are right behind. and then there’s the sweet corn. and then the pumpkin and squash and the changing of the leaves. and then the snow comes, and i can go snowshoeing and sit by the fireplace and read books and snuggle under my down duvet. our society has conditioned us to lose all appreciation for the changing of the seasons- every imaginable fruit can be obtained any time of year, you can maintain your room temperature at a comfortable 24°C all year round (and wear shorts inside!) and fly away to sunny beaches in february. i am trying to go back. to return to the days of our grandparents and their grandparents. where every season was special in its own way. i can never say what i love the most anymore: summer, fall, winter or spring. my favourite season is the one we’re in now.

barbara kingsolver taught me about canning, so i could preserve local bounty at it’s freshest myself, and continue keeping my food mileage low even in the cold months when nothing grows. i have my cold store of root vegetables and potatoes, a supply of squash and jars of jam and tomato sauce, fruits of my summer labours. the raspberries and strawberries i dried in my dehydrator brighten my granola and the “sun” dried tomatoes i made livens soup up. i always freeze the red bell peppers that my garden produces for quick pizzas, rice stews and soups in the cold months along with quarts of berries, picked from my favourite local u-pick. of course i’m not perfect. i usually cave and buy fresh pineapple, when i see it on sale. my banana-fast was hard (oatmeal is so much better with fluffy ‘naners) and i eat lots of citrus in the winter (it’s how i stay healthy), but i do try and make better choices when i can: florida oranges, instead of ones from south africa, for example. we just have to do the best we can.

in case you haven’t been following for too long, i am a farmer’s market addict. every thursday, on twitter, you can see what i’ve bought for the week, usually more than i can shove into my panniers and carry the 8 miles home on my bike, but i manage. all for the sake of good watermelon, freshly picked corn and peaches with integrity that don’t go mushy after a day. i love being able to see the person that planted my peas just after the last snow, the ones who painstakingly kept the weeds away, the people who dug up my carrots and potatoes. it makes the food i eat seem much more real, more honest. i once asked a bunch of kids i was teaching if they knew where their food came from, and all of them responded with “loblaws” (our local grocery chain). it made me sad that not one kid recognized that it is the farmers that feed cities. i hope things can change with our generation and the next one. i hope that i can pass along my love for the market, for farming and for delicious, fresh food.

(a summer of markets: brockville, boston, cambridge, north york)

when i met erin at the healthy living summit, i knew i had to take part in her keep it local challenge for september. i already eat almost entirely locally (as much as possible), but the challenge of making one meal per week of *entirely* local ingredients (excepting spices, condiments etc) was something i was up for! this is my map for week 1. (because i shop at the same market each week, my maps will probably be pretty similar throughout the month). not too shabby-

i decided to start the month off with a special meal. my sister and her boyfriend were visiting from california, so i cooked much more than i usually would for a weeknight meal. we had pork with a peach marinade, roasted potatoes and a raw pasta salad of zucchini, cucumber, and tomatoes (with spicy globe basil). to drink, i made a frozen watermelon slush, spiked with some fresh mint (and a glug of malibu rum, which was sadly not local). i apologize for the picture. my guests arrived much later than actual supper time, by which point the sun was long gone and i had to resort to flash. be assured, it was delicious.