Saskatoon berry pie

Dandelion at Niagara-on-the-Lake

Some of your postings yesterday have definitely inspired me to try baking a Saskatoon berry pie or tartlets (Kristen suggested with whipped cream, yum), if I can harvest the berries before the birds. Might be tricky this year, though, since the berries are likely going to fully ripen before Jeff and I move in (Graham says I should wait until the berries turn blue or purple), which means the birds will probably be feasting before then.

Don't know if I'd attempt the pastry crust from scratch, though. The last time I tried making pie pastry was a disaster. I served the pie to Jeff's sister shortly after we had met for the first time, wasn't my sister-in-law yet.

ME (nervous): "I think the crust might be a bit tough."

LARKIN: "Oh no, I'm sure it's fine, Debbie."

(Larkin struggles to cut her piece with a fork. Struggles very hard. The fork BENDS, unable to pierce the teflon-like material that is my pie crust.)

LARKIN: "Um, well, maybe it's a LITTLE tough..."

Sara fishing off the cottage dock last year.

This weekend, Jeff and Ray and I are going to paint my office. Then next week, my office gets a carpet! VERY hyped about this. Our storage locker isn't being unloaded into the house until the middle of next month when renovations are complete so I still won't be able to really use my office yet, but at least I can sit on the floor with my laptop and think happythoughts. :-)

Sent out a query about an article about the Northern Lights yesterday, got a go-ahead from the editor by the end of the day. I also think I may have sold my first gardening cartoon!

Got my Stokes, Richters and Veseys catalogs recently, woohoo! I've already started drooling over the Jiffy pots and grow lights and jaw-dropping number of interesting herbs and vegetables and flowers that could be growing in my garden next year. If I had a garden the size of the Northwest Territories, that is.

This year, I'm exerting enormous restraint and only planting a few herbs while I acquaint myself with our new garden. You can see pictures of all the plants I've managed to identify with the help of some of you, the previous owner, and the wonderful community at YouGrowGirl.com in this Flickr photo set.

Doing gardenstuff today, in fact. Ruth's sharing some of her groundcover plants and we're also visiting a nearby garden nursery so I can browse and get some fertilizer.

Had a nice evening yesterday. Jeff came home at an unprecedented hour (6 pm!) and we strolled along the lakefront, had dinner at a restaurant with outdoor patio, then visited GameTrek at the Royal York.

Sunrise at the cottage

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healthy snacks (poll results)

I dropped by the house late yesterday afternoon to check on the garden and was delighted to find robins feasting on the Saskatoon berry bushes. I was curious enough to try one of the berries...they're good! I might harvest some to use in cooking, but I'll share them with the birds. :-)

After doing some weeding and pruning of suckers from our Japanese quince, I worked on my laptop inside for about an hour, on a folding table set up during renovations. The contractors had gone home for the day, so it was nice to have the house all to myself even in its current war zone state.

Thanks so much to Bryan Snyder and Rick Hewett for their additions to my postcard collection! You can click on either postcard image below for a description and note, or visit my Flickr Postcard collection to see all the contributions so far. If you're in the mood to send me a postcard for the collection, please send to: Debbie Ridpath Ohi, 34 Eglinton Ave. W., P.O. Box 189, Toronto, ON Canada M4R 2H6. Thanks!

From Rick H.

Lots of interesting answers to my "healthy snack" poll. Here are a few:

"Healthy snack ideas: grapes, kiwi, apple, carrots with fat-free bean dip or fat-free hummus, air-popped popcorn (no extra stuff on it), make your own baked potato or sweet potato chips, cut up cantelope and watermelon, dried apple or banana chips (dehydrate in your oven or in a dehydrater)." (chirosinger)

"Snacks for me have to be *easy*, i.e. requiring little or no preparation, and I also quite like things to be crunchy/have a bite hence:
carrots, cucumbers, cherry tomatos, grapes, bananas, apples, baby sweetcorn, mange tout, pre-cut lettuce/salad leaves, sometimes broccoli or cauliflower - all raw." (bardling)

"Most kinds of raw vegetables work for me. There are vegetables that I dislike when they are cooked -- prime example, cauliflower -- but I absolutely love raw. Especially when dipped in hummus, which is fairly quick&easy to prepare from a mix. (Though sometime I'd like to try making it from scratch.)
I would add green grapes, one of the tarter apples, raisins and, of course, plums. Plums: the fruit that tastes more like candy than most candies. :-)
Unsalted, unbuttered popcorn is mighty tasty as well." (ldwheeler)

From Bryan S.

"Veggies and dip.
Various cut-up fruit, especially mangoes, papaya, pineapple, melons, etc. but only if someone else cuts it up ('cause much as I love it, I hate the cutting up).
Great big oranges.
Sherbet/sorbet in fruit flavours.
Salsa and tortillas (not chips)
Great multi-grain crackers, especially with sesame seeds." (jhayman)

"Popcorn.
It's not exactly a snack, but nonfat milk flavored with something yummy and sugar-free is always a favorite.
Sometimes I like small, fresh fruits, especially cherries, seedless grapes, and raspberries." (figmo)

"Cheese.
Celery with peanut butter. Apples with peanut butter. Really, a spoon with peanut butter would do.
Yogurt.
Dried fruit.
Soy nuts.
Tofu. Raw. Chunks of it. mmmmm." (missquirt)

"sugar snap peas
gensoy soy nuts (deep sea salted -- the other flavors
are poison)
unsalted brazil nuts
red, orange, and yellow peppers
del monte sunfresh grapefruit slices"
(Rand)

"I've been known to snack on thin slices of gruyere (mmmm, cheese!) or raw carrots. In fact, carrots are really high on my list of best all-around snacks; tasty and crunchy and also good for you." (Dave Weingart)

"I'm not sure how healthy this is, but a friend recently got me hooked on crackers and spicy hummus... " (Lady Turpentine)

"My favourite healthy snacks are chunky fries with malt vinegar, Ben and Jerry's Heath Bar Crunch ice cream, Stone Crock Bakery doughnuts, and Tofu squares in light soy sauce. HAHAHAHA! As if.
Well, they must be healthy because I'm not dead yet." (aiabx)

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door-shopping, healthy snacks

re: photo on the right. On the way to the house this past weekend, we saw this Starbucks sign. Is it just me, or is a "REMEMBER SUMMER" ad in June a bit odd?

Just over one month until we actually move into our New House. One of the rooms we're renovating is the master bedroom, which currently is open to the rest of the house. We're putting in a wall and a door for privacy and soundproofing, mainly at my insistence; I tend to wake up earlier than Jeff in the mornings, and want to be able to actually use the rest of the house without worrying about waking him up.

So on the weekend we went door-shopping (our friend Ray helped). Decisions to be made: number of doors (we went with double), type of wood, stain (decision to be made later), style of door, type of glass panels, number of glass panels, type of handle bla bla bla augh.

Both of us have been feeling pretty overwhelmed by the number of decisions to be made during this whole process. Started out with the Big Decision, of course (which house), but now the zillions of little decisions are gradually being whittled down.

I *SO* cannot wait until all the decisions have been made, at least enough that we can finally move in.



I'm very much into leftovers these days; Jeff's had to work late quite a bit these days so I'm on my own for meals. I tend to cook something big at the beginning of the week and live on the leftovers the rest of the week. Last week, I made a roast chicken and a big batch of Turkish kisir (bulghur salad).

My favourite drink recently is iced tea. I like herbal teas in general and have been experimenting with brewing tea then chilling it, sometimes combining different types. So far my favourites are licorice-mint, green iced tea and ginger-peach iced tea. I don't add sugar, just drink it straight, and I try to limit how much caffeinated iced tea I make.

My favourite snack these days is slices of cucumber, each with a dab of white miso. Yum. I'm a heavy snacker, by the way, grazing throughout the day, keeping meals small. The challenge is to keep snacks healthy and interesting (yes, baby carrots are healthy but if I eat too many of them, I want to chew my own head off), especially since I work at home.

So here's a survey:

What are your favourite healthy snacks?
I'll compile a list of results and post it in an upcoming Blatherings.

Some reader feedback from recent Blatherings:

Sherman:

"Pollination gets a bit complicated, Debbie. Some plants are self-pollinating, so you don't really need insects to do the fun stuff. For those who need pollinators, until recently you could generally count on bees, wasps, and other pollinators to do the job, though you could help by hand-pollinating. (In our yard, very few of the pollinators are hive bees. Most appear to be wasps and non-hive bees.)

Recently, though, there's been a vicious mite population that's been destroying hundreds of commercial hives in North America and will probably make a bunch of produce much more expensive in the next year or two. That's rather scary because, yes, flowers that are not in self-propagating plants will not germinate unless pollinated."

Margaret:

"If a particular flower doesn't get pollinated, it just dries up and falls off and doesn't make seeds. Which may be why lots of plants make clusters of flowers. If every flower in the cluster got pollinated, the clump of fruit would break off the branch-end. So there's slack in the system to allow for the bees missing some flowers."

Scott S.:

"Wow, great pictures of the barbeque. I sure wish I was Debbie Ohi's friend so I could hang out with such cool people. :-)"

Funny guy, that Scott Snyder.

;-)

By the way, congrats to Scott & Amanda on their recent babynews!

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tiny Ray

Happy Father's Day to you dads out there!

My friend Ray called me while he was waiting for a train this afternoon. I took a picture of him out of my mom-in-law's condo window. You can see a zoomed-in photo here.

Karin & Scott's wedding photo.

Hung out at the new house for a bit with Jeff and Ray yesterday morning to talk with Sean about renovation stuff. Renovation work is going well and on time, yay! Much of the first floor has been repainted, the new tub has been installed.

The movers are scheduled to bring our stuff out of storage in about a month. A month seems like forever to me right now; I am SO excited about being able to finally move in and get settled. To not have to commute for an hour to get to our place just to look at the garden. To have the house to ourselves. To be able to move into MY NEW OFFICE.

But I digress. During our visit yesterday, I had the check out the garden, of course, and was delighted to find the mock orange tree blooming outside our kitchen window:



And hey, I hadn't realized that hostas had flowers:

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I am immensely grateful to those of you who have been e-mailing or posting as well as the community at YouGrowGirl.com for helping me identify the various plants in our new garden! I still feel pretty clueless, but not QUITE as clueless as before.

There were lots of bumblebees flitting about our hardy geraniums. Check out this very cool close-up of a bumblebee in our garden that Ray took. He and I sat and watched the bumblebees for a bit; it was fascinating to watch them up close, sticking their tongues into the centre of each flower, soaking up nectar. I was curious enough to look up the anatomy of a bumbleebee when I got home.

I also wished I had paid more attention in grade school when we learned about flower pollination. I found myself wondering what happened to flowers that aren't pollinated, that happen to be missed for whatever reason. Does it just mean that the seeds from that flower won't germinate? I feel so ignorant. From this simple explanation, though, it does look as if there's no pollen, the plant won't progress in a way to allow propagation.

Later in the day, Jeff and I went to a post-wedding get-together held by Karin and Scott, who were married in Cuba earlier this year.

Here's Karin's dress, which she made herself for $40 (!):



She also made her own headpiece (see photo at top) out of earrings.

I like this photo of Reid:



Reid used my camera to take this photo of Luisa and me:



Vartan makes drinks behind the bar:



You can see some of the other photos in my Flickr photo set.

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