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:

<

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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wordgoddess collab: hobbies

Today's entry is part of a Wordgoddess collab. The topic: "hobbies."

The word "hobbies" itself could be the subject of some debate. I decided to go with the Wikipedia definition of hobby: "Hobbies are practised for interest and enjoyment, rather than financial reward." So though I'm a writer for interest and enjoyment as well financial reward (though the latter is not as spectacular as I would like yet), I'll omit it from this entry.

Drawing

I've always loved drawing. Probably because I hated colouring when I was a kid, could never stay inside the lines. My friends back in early grade school used to ask me to draw pictures so they could colour them.

You can see some of my doodles on this page.



Comics

This is related to the above hobby, of course, but I now consider it a hobby on its own. Some of my comics:

Waiting For Frodo: A three-year trip I did about a avid fan and his friends waiting in line for upcoming Lord of the Rings movies. I even had fans at Weta Digital. :-)



My Life In A Nutshell: Semi-autobiographical comic.



Inkygirl comics: These are comics related to the writing life. I posted some during Nanowrimo a while back, posting others to Inkygirl from time to time.



Gardening comics: Just started this collection. :-)



Music

Jodi, Allison and I perform at Confluence in 2004.
Photo by John Hall.

I've been a member of the filk/folk trio Urban Tapestry for almost twelve years now. Jodi, Allison and I get together to practise for upcoming gigs (hey, we're performing in a castle in Germany this October!) and just to hang out. We have a tape and two CDs. We all write songs for the group, and some have aired on national radio.



This definitely fits the definition of hobby, since we don't make nearly enough money to call it anything else. We're happy if we make enough from CD sales to enable us to get to conventions where we can hang out with friends and make music. :-) I have fun playing music on my own, but I find I get far more pleasure out of playing with other people.

If you're wondering what filk is, do check out my site, The Dandelion Report.

Instruments I play:
Piano (I taught piano for about 25 years part-time), flute, Celtic harp, penny whistle, guitar, assorted bangy percussion things. My tendinitis has made it tough to play some of these instruments in the past few years, but I'm confident that my tendons will eventually recover to that point I'll be able to pick them all up again at some point.

This past year, I also started to get into Irish session music with my penny whistle, attending biweekly sessions in Toronto.

And above and to the right you can see a studio picture of my harp, custom-built by Larry Fisher (click for bigger version).

Urban Tapestry keychain figures created by Michelle Bottorff. I'm the one in the middle!
Our friend Kathleen Sloan bought these for us at an Interfilk auction.

Collections

When I was a kid, I used to collect autographs. I was too shy to ask for them in person, so usually researched contact info in the big Who's Who in our local library, then write to the person with a letter and a self-addressed stamped envelope. My collection includes autographs from Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Zenna Henderson, Michael Crichton, Mort Walker, Anne Murray, Isaac Asimov, the Carpenters, Jean-Pierre Rampal, and Bill Gaines (MAD magazine).

One of my favourites was a hand-typed letter from Stephen King. It even had liquid papered corrected mistakes.




I also used to collect stamps; I'm sure my stamp collection is sitting in some box in our storage locker right now.

Postcard from MEW.

I currently collect postcards, and have started posting them in my Flickr postcard collection. I recently added postcards from Mary Ellen (Vermont) and Alexa (Germany)...thanks so much! If you feel like sending me one, please mail it to: Debbie Ridpath Ohi, 34 Eglinton Ave W., P.O. Box 189, Toronto, ON Canada M4R 2H6.

I have a weird food collection (non-perishable items) which I plan to display on Flickr once we get settled in our new house.

I also collect bookmarks. This is one of my favourite collectible item because they're small, relatively inexpensive, and I use them all the time. At the end of Waiting For Frodo, I sent out a shameless plea for bookmarks and was gratified by the response. Here are a few that I received from around the globe:



Crafts

The photo below is of my first attempt at painted ceramics. I was quite pleased with how it turned out (a gift for Jeff) but want to experiment more with paint colours and textures.



One thing I'm really looking forward to in our new house is having a home office large enough to turn one of the corners into a craft area. When we lived out in the country, I used to be involved in all kinds of crafty-type activities, and even made a bit of money off some freelance work. I tend to give most of my craft projects away to friends and family, and my few still-surviving projects are in the storage locker, so I'll just have to describe them in text instead of posting photos:

Papermaking
Watercolor painting (I handpainted our wedding invitations and programs)
Wreath-making (woven entirely from materials I found outside)
Fimo sculptures (tiny animals I'd do for fun, then give to friends)
Christmas ornaments made from felt (I had fun creating unique ornaments)
Rubber stamping
Beading (Allison showed me how to make earrings)

As for needlework, I've never had much luck due to lack of patience. My one and only completed needlework project was a crocheted baby blanket for my niece Sara, started when I heard my sister was pregnant. It ended up being the size of a large misshapen handkerchief rather than a blanket, but I did still proudly sew a "MADE BY YOUR AUNT" label into one corner.

Gardening

This is a very recently started hobby inspired by our purchase of a new house that came with an established perennial garden. Here's one of my favourite views of the garden (along side of the house), which I'm currently using as a desktop image:



Yikes. This entry is way too long, and I could easily keep blathering on about other hobby-type activities like photography, canoe trips and cooking and chocolate and learning languages and food movies and office supply stores and tea and and and

But I'd better post this now before it gets unmanageable. I guess what I've learned most from this entry is that there are so many interesting and exciting things to do in the world and too little time to do them. :-)

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survey: practical and decadent purchases

Our peonies are blooming!

Thanks for the paint suggestions, everyone; I realize now I should have gotten a SMALL paint sample and tried it on the wall first, duh. Because my carpet won't be installed until the end of this month, I might hold off on choosing a paint until next month. Or I might just go with plain white.

Look how happy this woman is with her Hook'n'Go!

My most recent useful purchase was the Hook'n'Go Shopping Bag Caddy. Can't believe I didn't get this years ago, but then again perhaps it wasn't available years ago; I found out about it recently from my friend Cathy. I used to use Grocery Gateway, on online grocery shopping service, but I find that I really enjoy grocery shopping in person.

Yes, I admit it...I actually do ENJOY grocery shopping, browsing the fresh produce area, snooping through the ethnic food ingredients aisle. Since I don't drive, I'm limited in how much I can carry, especially so since the whole tendinitis thing began. I used to have a regular shopping cart but I found it too bulky, and my bags of groceries got squished because I had to pile them on top of each other.

My new Hook'n'Go caddy can carry up to 70 lb of groceries, and folds up. I can pull it behind me (I prefer this) or push it in front like a normal shopping cart. I've used it twice so far and love it. Each time, at least one person has asked me where I got it.

And it's a heckuva lot easier on my tendons and shoulder muscles than lugging stuff around in a backpack and by hand. If you're interested in checking it out, here's the page from Hedonics (picking it up in person will save you the shipping cost). It's also available from Hammacher-Schlemmer (sp?), but it's more expensive.



My most recent decadent purchase is lavender-olive hand soap: Savon de Marseille Extra Pur Olive Lavande. I've been wanting some ever since first trying it years ago, saw it for sale for the first time in a tablecloth shop (!) in Niagara-on-the-Lake a couple of weeks ago.

The fragrance is heavenly and my hands never feel too dry after using it, as is often the case with other soaps. Every time I use it, I feel like I'm being pampered. The sensual and emotional pleasure I get each time makes it so worth the extra money, at least for me. The awareness that I will likely only buy this once a year makes it that much more special.

Ok, now your turn...

Survey:

What was your most recent useful purchase?
What was your most recent decadent purchase? (doesn't have to involve a lot of money, but needs to be something purchased more for pleasure than practicality)

Some garden pics...

Cranesbill (aka Hardy Geranium):



Clematis (not sure what kind):



Another type of clematis :



Pink flowers have appeared at the end of our tamarisk tree branches:



We thought the tree below was dead. Jeff cut it off near the base, was about to pull it out completely, noticed a couple small leaves near ground level, decided to leave it to see what happened. Looks like it's coming back to life...



My new oregano plant:

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