Happy Easter!

Happy Easter Everyone! It's my favourite holiday of the year.  And this Easter Sunday has turned out to be a beautiful day - chockful of blooming flowers! (See the picture above.)

We were in London for the Easter weekend, which was great because we got to see Tim's side of the family; meet an interesting family that's living our dream by living in rural northern ontario with five home-schooled kids (ok, maybe my dream, 5 kids seems a little much for Tim); and we also got to spend the Easter Triduum (well Friday and Saturday) at St. George's which was a great Easter present to ourselves.

My school year is over, which means that I am trying to find myself a summer job (if anyone knows about anything either construction-y or planning-y in the heritage field let me know! Will travel for work!) But while I am on the hunt for the elusive awesome summer job experience I will be working on the garden. We started cutting out the sod a few weeks ago when it was warmer but its been raining ever since. Here's a sneak peek of what we are working with, there will be more to come in the next little while.

Ulli eating grass in the garden area that should not have grass! We'll be getting to that this week.

Carmelized Onion Tart

I don't really understand it when people say that they hate to cook for just themselves. I love it. I feel none of the responsibility of feeding and pleasing other people when I cook just for me. I can eat crappy food if I really want to OR I can get really creative OR I can make something that takes a bit longer to make but which makes me happy without thinking about other people getting hungry, while I'm taking my sweet-a$$ time making dinner. Tonight's dinner falls into all of those categories above, Tim's away, so in the kitchen I was, getting to play. And I decided I wanted to make a tart, unfortunately (or is it fortunately, because it ended up being delicious!!) I didn't have much to put in the tart.

Sooo, I caramelized some onions, managed to make the most out of the rest of my rind of parmesan and chopped up a few kalamatas from the oversized Costco jar (best Costco purchase ever - we go through those things like water) and wrapped it all up in a delicious extra-buttery free form tart crust (which I added spelt flour to, out of guilt for the amount of butter I used).

This is kind of like an even worse version of Pissaladiere, one of my favourite pizzas, but with more crust (and a way more buttery version at that) and I held off on the anchovies - thinking that the kalamatas were salty enough. Although in retrospect, seeing as Tim was away, I perhaps should have taken the opportunity to get my anchovy fix in. Feel free to add a few, anchovies only make things better, I swear!


Caramelized Onions:
3-4 large onions, sliced thinly
salt and pepper,
olive oil and butter
thyme
1 tbsp. good quality balsamic vinegar

Heat olive oil and butter (however much you want, I did about a tbsp of each) in a frying pan and add your onions. Season this with salt and pepper. Set to medium-low, cover and leave it for a good 15-20 mins. stirring occasionally. You want the onions to soften. Once this accomplished, uncover it, add about a tsp of thyme if using dry or a tbsp if using fresh stuff, and turn up the heat to medium. You'll want to stir it occasionally to end up with a lovely golden brown mess of delicious caramelized yumminess. This will probably take another good 15 mins. Right at the end, add your balsamic vinegar - the more stars your vinegar has the better for this part - you want to enhance the sweetness, not make it acidic. Meanwhile, you can work on your tart crust.

Savoury Spelt Tart Crust:

3/4 c. white flour
1/2 c. spelt flour (you can sub in any other whole grain flour, but spelt is delicious)
1/2 tsp. salt
10 tbsp. or a 11/4 sticks of unsalted butter, frozen or refrigerated and cut into small chunks
1 egg yolk
2-3 tbsp. cold water

Place flours and salt in a food processor and process until combined. Add all of the butter at once and buzz away, until the butter has been distributed evenly in the flour. (My food processor is a little intense, so it ends up being like large bits of sand, rather than the more common consistency of peas.) Add the egg yolk and blend. Dump it all into a bowl and work the water into it, until it just sticks together. You might need to add a bit more. Form a disc of the dough and wrap that in plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge for a minimum of 10 minutes.

To assemble:

Caramelized Onions
Tart Crust
1/3 cup chopped kalamatas
Parmesan or other delicious cheese to taste

Preheat your oven to 450F. Roll out your dough to about a quarter inch consistency, in a roughly circular shape. Grate some cheese into the centre of the dough, leaving yourself enough room to fold the pastry over onto itself. Pile your onions and kalamatas onto that and then fold over your pastry. It doesn't matter what it looks like, it can be roughly circular (or polygonal in my case) what matters is that all is contained because it will taste great in any shape you end up with - I kind of like that it ends up looking like a windmill. You can grate a little extra cheese over the top of this.  Stick it in the oven on a cookie sheet or a piece of parchment on a pizza stone like I did and cook for up to 30 minutes or more. Keep an eye on it when its all toasty brown its done.

And then enjoy with a salad or with a delightful saute of cauliflower and kale, like I did. Magnifico!

A Few of My Favourite Things

Just a few things that I've been really diggin' lately.

Photo Courtesy: thisweekfordinner.com, 2010.

The Food Matters Cookbook by Mark Bittman: Everyone who knows me knows that I am a serious Mark Bittman recipe groupie. My wonderful little brother happened to (unknowingly of my Bittman obsession) buy me his How to Cook Everything  and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian a few Christmases ago and with that there was no turning back. In those cookbooks, Bittman has the most wonderful basic (and complex variations) on anything you could possibly want to cook and his newest cookbook doesn't disappoint. With a new ethical philosophy on eating responsibly - for the planet, society and our own bodies - that is of course in Bittman-esque simplicity incredibly straightforward, i.e. eat less meat and more legumes, replace refined carbohydrates with whole grains and alternative sugars, and don't eat anything you can't pronounce (basically make your own foods). 

Tim and I have gravitated towards eating less meat (flexitarians) for quite sometime now, but this book has made me feel a whole lot less guilty about it -- by explaining the fallacy of the meat = protein equation, once and for all and by explaining how much energy is spent in meat production - it's an incredibly unethical disgusting amount. Don't get me wrong, I love me a good steak every now and then, and thanks to my awesome hunting-gathering/friends-with-organic-farmers parents, much of the meat we do eat is wild or organic. But we are now trying to only eat meat once or twice a week and even then we use it as more of a garnish than the main menu item. A nice side effect has been the reduction of our food bill, as well as getting to try out all kinds of cool new foods - like millet and farro ---- can you say delicious risotto!

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Jane Jacobs, 1961. This edition 1972. Cover photograph by Max Yavno.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs: I know, I know, Jane Jacobs seems to be a total trend right now but I have become increasingly attracted to the planning side of heritage and I couldn't not read Jane Jacobs obviously, and it just so happens that I love this book. 

It's actually kind of amazing that Jacobs was writing at the time about things that may seem counterintuitive to what most people think about big cities but make so much sense when you think about them even just a little bit. Like that sidewalks are where social interaction happens, and contrary to the idea that they are dangerous places in the inner city, they are often the safest place to be - especially when they are overlooked by the traditional mix of commercial and residential. Just think about it - if you've more people who think of an area as their own community - they know what are normal events for their sidewalks and what aren't. They will police it without even thinking about it.

Essentially Jacobs makes the case that complex community systems in the inner city really work (i.e. mixed use neighbourhoods) and that the whole of modern planning methods denied this and by separating residential from commercial from industrial you are essentially destroying human ecosystems. I like to think of Jacobs as having a holistic approach to planning - if you have a little bit of everything you are going to win everytime - especially if you ask the people who actually live in those communities which little bits they appreciate and want in their own communities. But this is the huge caveat, you have to ask the people who live in an area what makes their community their own - it might be the local coffee shop but that doesn't mean you should plan on having one in every community. What works in one place  won't necessarily work somewhere else.

P.S. Here's a really cool interview from the CBC archives with Jane Jacobs.

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Photo Courtesy: http://www.cocoandvanilla.com, 2010.

You're gonna be like "What?!" when I mention this next thing but believe me they are delicious and good for you and gluten-free. Right now I am loving Black Bean Brownies. I know it sounds weird and awful but in actuality these are incredibly good, dense, moist, chocolate goodies. Not only do they use legumes in place of flour (increasing your protein potential and making them very filling) they use agave nectar in place of sugar (decreasing your use of refined carbs). I can eat a couple of these itsy bitsy 1 inch brownies for dessert and be totally satiated.

I've also found a recipe I haven't had a chance to try yet that replaces the butter with banana - making these low fat and vegan. Cha-ching.

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Photo Courtesy: © 1999 Dietmar Regensburger/Innsruck

This awesome 5 part Ideas from the CBC on Rene Girard. I had to read some of his literature on the Scapegoat when I was in Theology which I thought was fascinating at the time but then promptly forgot about after the class. But then what do you know, I'm on my way home a few weeks ago and catch the tail end of Ideas (which is generally awesome but which I rarely ever catch) and I hear them talking with Girard about victimization in the modern society. I didn't even realize it was Rene Girard they were talking with but it piqued my interest thoroughly enough for me to seek the archive out on-line and listen to the whole thing during the course of one afternoon. 

Girard is a French academic that has created this all-encompassing system which doesn't fall under any one academic discipline but is an anthropological, philosophical approach to humanity that draws upon ancient literature (the greeks), the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, to form an understanding of the violence inherent in mimetic desire (the competitive desires of individuals towards the same goals).  The interview with him goes over his whole body of work and is a really great listen if you've got 5 hours of free time (it sounds like a lot but you could just replace 1 hour a day of television with a mini-lecture).

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Photo Courtesy: Irene O'Toole, http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/JOVMNAcCgKe8zBXVZqLuig

And now my last favourite thing of the moment....vegetable peelings. Yep, you heard right and you may believe that this is somewhat of an anti-climatic ending to this post. With all of the vegetables we've been eating, there seemed to be a lot of waste - and even thought we are lucky enough to live in a place which has green waste pick up - I was still feeling bad about the amount of waste. 

So I've started to keep a couple of freezer bags in the freezer that I fill up with all of my vegetable peelings (from pretty much everything except for the really watery things like tomatoes and cucumbers and don't put the papery skins of onions in - it'll make your stock bitter). After a couple of weeks or sometimes even just one week, I'll boil all of those vegetable peelings and make my own vegetable stock or chicken stock if we've had one recently (after picking the bones I put the carcass in the freezer to save for stock too). I reserve this activity for the weekend, when electricity is cheaper and I have the time to let it simmer on the stove for most of the day. I usually boil up a couple of batches of grains and beans on the weekend as well (in keeping with Food Matters- see above) so that they are easy to toss together during the week - so I'm in and out of the kitchen anyways.

There is still the same amount of waste but at least I'm getting the full nutritive and economic value out of everything and I'm buying way less bouillon cubes and making way more soup. Frugality is the bomb.

Oops I did it again...

So, I know I seem to be taking inordinately long amounts of time off from blogging, but that is mostly because I've kinda been boring for the last little while. We've done some slightly interesting things at school, that could have made for some interesting pics but I wouldn't have had much to say about them. Soooo, I'm going to put everything together in a mad mangled montage of stuff. (Which, sadly, is really not a bad analogy for my life.) Here goes:

Historic Roofing: Two whole days of discussing different roofing materials and then making a very poor attempt at roofing ourselves - on (if I do say so myself) the tiniest roofline ever. We tried out cedar, slate and copper - and ended up with a very eccentric looking roof. And yay, we got to work with lead again.

Incredibly realistic, as you can see, considering it is two feet off the ground.

Ruthven...again: Some of you may recall one of the historic places Tim and I visited a while back, the estate Ruthven in Cayuga, ON. At the time I only posted pictures of the outside since being cheapskates, Tim and I didn't want to pay to go inside. Lucky for me, we got to go on a (free) field trip and I got to take a bunch of pictures on the inside. It was very interesting because it is being maintained as a family estate - with all of its various permutations - including the whacky teal 1960s kitchen. But what was most striking - to me - was the fantastic elliptical staircase. Oh, and the family portraits.

I went a little artsy on it. But isn't it fantastic. This is looking up from the main floor. 

And here's my favourite portrait. This dapper looking Thompson, was wounded in WWI and upon being nursed back to health returned to Canada to become a Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod - hence the swanky outfit. We giggled a lot at his title, of course I got home and told Tim about him and he knew exactly what that was - apparently it's quite the big political dealy. Also, notice in the right hand bottom corner - I totally think his ghost did not approve of our giggles.

Carpentry: We are sadly finished carpentry for this year. Boo! I completed my panel, and we had moved on to the teeniest tiniest doors you've ever seen. Mine is 15'x 8 1/2'. It's adorable. But alas, we ran out of time to work on it in class. I am hoping I will be able to find some extra time to finish it up and make the teeniest of door frames for it. I am envisioning painting it red and putting it up along with my panel. Or maybe attaching it to a tree, like a tiny door to the elfin realm! I'm weird like that.

This was at the stage where I was just finishing up my tenons and was laying out my mortices. I have since begun to work on the teeniest panels you've ever seen, to fit into the dados. P.S. Shouts out to Doug, for letting us use his awesome multi-plane that allowed us to do our dados in 30 minutes instead of half a day. It was almost like using a
power tool.

Plastering: I didn't get any pictures of this. It was a little messy and smelly and really hard to get a chance to get into with so many of us clustered around a rather small wall mock up. And I'm still lamenting the fact that I don't know the ratios for the mortar and plaster mixes. Next week we are making a trip to T.O. to check out some great examples of plaster conservation, I'll definitely picture that up for sure.

Ithaca: Tim and I made a trip down to Ithaca, NY, to visit our friends Shaun and Amanda, made famous in my post about stained glass and wedding cakes. We totally crashed the honeymoon period. We even made it up to Cornell to listen to Shaun wax poetic on the troubadour tornada. The campus was beautiful but alas, I forgot my camera again -- which really wasn't that tragic considering there was a major blizzard going on. We did stop at a gorge on our way back home though and I was able to snap a few pictures of that...of course I was also drawn to the stone bridge.

The gorge falls, looking from the bridge. It was really cool. As you can see there are all of these  huge rocks that sit very proud of the water. It makes for a fantastic landscape...

...complimented by an almost equally fantastic stone bridge.

Aboriginal Perspectives: We had a wonderful man, Sakoieta Widrick, come and speak to us about the Mohawk people. He told us some incredible stories, taught us about traditional medicines, as well as some dances, songs and the peach basket game. But most importantly he imparted great knowledge about what it is like to be an aboriginal person in Canada and the U.S. It was a true blessing to have him speak to us, and I think we all felt like we learned a great deal, ecologically, intellectually and spiritually.

The Wall is Completed: I'm not sure I mentioned on here, but many of you know I have been doing casual updates on the work on the South-West Wall project at Willowbank. This has wrapped up just this past week, and as such I've just finished up my last update which should be up and posted in the next few weeks. If you are interested you can link to the updates on the Willowbank website and see what the project was all about.

And I think that is about it. Again, I apologize profusely for my lack of interweb communication. I'll try to be a better blogger!

The deed is done...almost

I'm finished my panels!...well almost. It's all glued together and drying and then we'll do the final pegging in a couple of weeks when we have carpentry again. This week, I finished fielding the backs of my two panels and reworked my frames (only slightly) to fit the panels in and then we fitted everything together and voila! a super cool and useless set of panels that has taught me how to saw, plane, make dovetails and lapjoints, make a dado, field and troubleshoot a furniture fit.

My panels and frame all trussed up with pipe clamps. The panels are free fit, so that they can shift about with changes in climate and the frame is attached around them. Right now there is just a bit of glue helping it out. It will have pegs put in each joint as well. But it was a pretty good furniture fit to begin with.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with it. I am of course, super proud of my kinda useless project and am wondering if I should paint it and do a fun artsy thing on the raised panels or if I should just wax it and put it on the wall. Any thoughts?

And then we moved on to some rudimentary large tenons which we will hopefully get to making some mortices for next time around.

The tenon that I made after clamping together the above panels and frame. It will eventually be a through-tenon. I measured and remeasured and cut very, very straight lines so this baby should it's mortice like a hand fits a glove.

Wedding Cakes and Stained Glass

I apologize for the long vacation I took from blogging. Needless to say the turn of the new year saw us very busy, with Hen and Cock - a- doos (our english friend's way of saying bachelor/bachelorette party), weddings and getting sick and getting back to school, I could not seem to find a way to get back to blogging. But I'm back now!

The first few weeks of school have been pretty low key anyways, with the exception of doing some glazing (i.e. stained glass) we were pretty boring. Which was good because it gave me time to start making the great big wedding cake for Shaun and Amanda's wedding. Which turned out fabulous - even though it had to sit overnight - it was still delicious and moist - probably due to the 6 lbs.!! of butter in the icing. Everyone loved it - even  the two grandmothers, who were the true taste testers.

Picture of the emcees, our good friends Ilan and Dan, with the cake. You can see the lovely menu we were treated to on the blackboard in the background. And no our friends who got married were not mathematicians though they are academicians and the wedding was at Wycliffe college in T.O.  (Picture is courtesy of the bride's cousin, Simona - Thanks Simona! because I forgot to take pictures of my own masterpiece.) 

And heres the moment of truth from the gorgeous bride and handsome groom! There were no complaints. Also a big shout out to Shaun and Amanda, the lovely couple above, for baking 25 meat and vegetarian pies for their own wedding and for being gorgeous. (Again picture is courtesy of the brides cousin Simona - Thanks again!)

Anyhow, after all the feverish wedding goings-on. I was able to actually get back on track and finished my stained glass project. We were lucky to have a fantastic instructor John F. Wilcox of Vitreous Glassworks who not only taught us about the history of glass (who knew it was so interesting - from Pliny the Elder to Tiffany to Henry Holiday) but taught us how to create our own actually 'stained' glass. We not only got to paint on our own designs and then stain the glass with silver (which turns the glass yellow - so cool!) before firing them in the kiln, we also put together our own pieces - a fun and sometimes dangerous project.

But John's enthusiasm was contagious, and I soon got over my anxiety surrounding shattering glass and the quantities of heavy metals we were coming in contact with (it's not just lead - there are some nasty things in the paints as well). It may have helped to have been rewarded by ending up with a really cool piece - if I do say so myself - complete with morbid skull and all.

This is my piece. Obviously I didn't get a good picture with  light coming through it and as we speak it is blustery snow and overcast out so I can' t even attempt a better picture but you get the idea. The centre is a skull with roses around it and  you can't really see it but the back is stained with silver making the skull a deeper yellow.  The border pieces are recycled glass from St. Leo's in Toronto.

We also went on a little field trip into Queenston to see the stained glass in the Brock Memorial Church - St. Saviour's. It was amazing to see some of what John called the most beautiful glasswork in Southern Ontario. The altar glasswork was absolutely amazing and unlike so much of our modern stained glass which has minimal painting and details and is mostly just shaped coloured glass, this work by McCausland Glass was absolutely resplendent with intricate painted details that really brought the glass to life. We have been to this church before, and it is amazing because you can't really see these details until you are up close to the altar and yet they were still put in, because that was what you did at the time. Just another example of the craftsmanship of the past.

A picture of the altar glass at St. Saviour's. Look at how vivid the colour is - especially in the layering on the shield. And look at the details in the face and clothing. You can barely see them, but those are intricate swirling dragons on the breastplate of the Archangel.

Another stunning view of the details in the altar glass. All of the little border pieces are painted with beautiful designs and I absolutely adore these oak tree pieces that are scattered throughout the piece and were all done by hand.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Just a quick note to say Merry Christmas to everyone. We didn't send out Christmas cards this year, I know, yet again. But hopefully this blog will stand in for our once upon a time annual newsletters. 

I really appreciate everyone who has been keeping up to date with my/our goings on in Niagara. This blog has ended up being a communication lifeline to a lot of family and friends and I'm so glad and thankful for that.  (Just in case anyone wants to leave comments, its kind of a silly application, but you have to click on the "0 Comments" at the bottom of a posting and then a template will pop up that you can leave a comment on.)

We are thankful to be healthy and happy and living life to the fullest in Niagara. I have felt blessed to be on the path that I know find myself on and wish to thank everyone who has supported us on our journey. I guess that Christmas is as good a time as any to be thankful and I am!

So thank you one and all. Have a great Christmas and New Year's with your family and friends. I will be having a great holiday with all of mine and will be back to posting again in the New Year.

Merry Christmas

Love,

Crystal and Tim