Happy Birthday!

This week celebrated Trapper Jerry’s 92nd Birthday in Banff. Still skiing Delirium Dive and still handsome in his Crocodile hat!

Have a lovely Saturday,

Sarah

Cuckoo cherie.

Well, it’s my first family day in Alberta (cue music) and while I love a long weekend, I’m a little at loss with what to do today with my family so far away.

I’ve decided to grab the ‘ol binoculars and head down to the Cave and Basin marsh and check out the magpies, crows and the little fish caught in the swamp.

If you’re in the city today, or stuck at your desk, why not check out Paul Morstad’s bird paintings instead?

Have a lovely Monday,

Sarah

Cachinnate and maieutic

oh boy oh boy oh boy!

Tonight is the 19th annual Spelling Bee and Trivia Challenge at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. It’s one of the more brainy activities as part of Banff’s Winter Carnival happening right now in town. Now, this would normally be the type of thing you read about in the back of the community news section of your paper a week after the fact. But in a small town this is the place to be on a Tuesday night!

Chris and I will be going head to head on opposing teams this year; he’ll be playing with the Banff Centre marketing team, and I with the Cranium Crawlers (the nerdy ladies from softball!). There’s about a dozen teams ready to take on such subjects as local history, geography, and “name that tune.” My rock and roll history class will finally pay off! heh.

I sure wish these ladies were at the carnival this year. May the biggest brain win!

Garden of Eatin’

When I came to Banff last spring, I had visions of living in a little cottage, with a little garden, growing tomatoes and flowers. Quickly I discovered no one had gardens here. Bears will eat your berries. The elk will eat your veggies. So a few fantasies were quickly put to rest. Oh well.

But there’s something about living in the mountains that makes me want to be able to grow my own food. As I’m still not quite at that stage yet, a couple of books filled in the gaps nicely and got the ‘ol melon a turnin’.

In The 100 Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating a couple from Vancouver, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon decide to eat locally for an entire year. At first it sounded impossible to me; no avocados, mangoes, Aunt Jemima pancake mix, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Coke and no potato chips. But they do much better than you would expect, or than I expected, anyhow, finding farmers around the Vancouver area who grow everything they need (from veggies to livestock). I think Chris and I might kill each other with a project such as this one, as I thought the authors might half-way through, too. Canning corn at midnight sounds like a recipe for disaster. But the fact that they make it all the way to the one year mark, happy, feeling healthy, and not desperately missing junk food was fascinating. It’s also caused me to start looking a little more closely at what I eat. Maybe not so far as to grow my own food yet, but to at least question buying blueberries from New Zealand and to enjoy Canadian fruits and vegetables when they are in season.

Doug Fine is a man in New Mexico with a similar mission: to not only eat locally, but to stop living off fossil fuels. He’s written about his successes and failures in his book Farewelll my Subaru and also on his website. I’m particularly interested to hear of his success with goat’s mik ice cream. mmmm

He’ll be speaking as part of the Mountain Culture series tomorrow night, which I am really disappointed to be missing. Hopefully the Banff Centre will have videos of the talk available online in the near future.

A little Nigella for Alexis

Hmm, what to have for brunch on New Year’s day? I had oatmeal and coffee, which was fine, but I would’ve really loved to have Nigella Lawson’s tomato and bacon hash. Oh mama, so salty and bacony. This recipe was on the Food Channel a few months ago and it’s been stuck in the ‘ol melon since then. I can’t think of a better kinda-healthy-after-party-breakfast.

Why not take a moment and watch the video right here?

If you’re looking for some ideas for breakkie tomorrow, here’s the recipe taken from the episode “Breakfast all Hours.” Hope you had a fantastic New Year’s Eve!

Bacon and Tomato Hash

Ingredients

• 4 rashers streaky bacon
• 2 teaspoons garlic-infused oil
• 1 tomato, diced
• 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley leaves
• Freshly ground black pepper
• Serving suggestion: bread

Directions

Cut each piece of bacon into 3 or 4 pieces. Heat oil in a skillet. When oil is hot, fry bacon until crispy (the bacon will also give up flavorful fat of its own). Remove the bacon to a piece of kitchen towel.

Add the diced tomato, with all its seeded, gluey interior, into the hot oily pan, which will cause a great spitting and sizzling, and stir for a couple of minutes. Add the Worcestershire sauce and stir again, then put the bacon back into the pan, mixing it into the tomato before transferring to a plate.

Scatter with some parsley and freshly ground black pepper, and serve with bread to dip in the oily juices.

Where will the time go?

With New Years only a few days away I’m starting to wonder what types of projects or changes might be in store for 2009. Not in a New-Years-Resolution type way, however, which are always broken immediately. (Who bought a gym membership and went three times in a year?)

I think I’d like to simply get things done this year. Pure and simple. Turning 30 might also be to powering this list – I was supposed to be living in California and fluent in German by now. Mach schnell!

So, one obtainable goal I’d like to set I’m going to set for this year is to try to make breakfast at home more often. Instead of coffee and a croissant every day from the coffee shop at work, as much as I love them, I’ll whip something up at home. I found a flickr set not long ago that has the tastiest set of photos taken at breakfast every morning. This picture in particular kills me:

If I could stop hitting snooze so many times and hurry up and get out of bed, this is what I’d like to have for breakfast in the morning. I’d also love to be organized enough to make homemade scones, freeze them, and heat them up in the morning. But that seems to much to ask at this juncture.

Hmm… I’m still not sure this plan is feasible. Maybe I’ll hope for this Christmas miracle instead.

Happy Holidays!

Hope you’re having a lovely Christmas. I have so much in store tomorrow I can barely stand it. Fancy breakfast with meats, cheeses, coffee (with that lovely liquid vanilla. mmm) cookies and so on. Then opening some presents – Santa sure has sent a lot of packages from Montreal. weeeeee! The rest of the day will be spent skiing at Sunshine and later on cooking a turkey. So far our first Christmas in Banff is getting a big high-five.

Here’s hoping your Christmas is tasty and delicious, too!

xo Sarah

Where has the time gone?

Could it be that there hasn’t been anything happening here since April? That’s terrible! The last few months have been spent moving in and out of new apartments (three), learning the ropes at a new job, camping, concerts, hiking, skiing, skating, watching blockbuster movies, and spying on elk and mountain sheep out of my living room window.

But it’s also been a bit restless. Books and movies started and not finished. Cell phones in limbo. Projects started and put aside. (Well, that’s not really that out of the ordinary I guess.)

I think it’s time to get the ball rolling again. I’ll need to wade through about eight months of spam and dust off the ‘ol html, however.

While I’m cleaning up, why not take a peak at one of my favourite sites: Orangette. So many good recipes and pictures.  The author even has a book coming out soon,  A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table.

Check in again soon, won’t you?

Busybodies and Killjoys

Most times I’ll buy a book after having someone recommend it, or after reading a review. Maynard and Jennica,  by Rudolph Delson, however, was one of the first books that was a total mystery to me when I came across it, yet I knew instantly that I had to go out and buy it. I actually threw on pants and ran (kay, walked briskly. the sidewalks were icy.) down to Chapters to look for it.

Here are some of the reasons I risked broken ankles.

1. I stumbled across Rudolph online mentioning that he loved Andrew Bird. Who also loves Andrew bird? Me. What’s not to love about warbles and whistling?

2. He delivers excellently goofy book readings – at Google headquarters (!). You can watch the reading of Maynard and Jennica, along with question and answers, online right…… here.

3. Not only does he give goofy lectures, he also poses for a good goofy picture.

4. He lived in Germany, earning a living selling personal letters to strangers.

5. Last, I think Rudolph perfectly sums up both the story and my feelings about the book in an interview from Powell’s Books:

“… at least in literature, the misanthrope and the romantic are opposites. In the misanthropic comedy, we laugh at the follies of a man who loathes the misery of the people he sees around him; in the romantic comedy, we laugh at the fancies of a woman who longs to be happy like the people she sees around her. Similarly, there are two things you can do with blackberries: plant them along your fence to keep the world out, or pick them from the roadside for pancakes.”

Well,  if I can’t convince you, maybe New York’s literati can!

Easter – I like you, I really do!

One of the best tips I ever got from my Mum was to hide my dirty dishes in the oven when unexpected guests come over. Genius!

I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence by Amy Sedaris has lots of little caramel nuggets of ideas, just like my Mum’s. It’s a big hunker of a book, filled with lots of recipe ideas and hosting ideas (like hiding marbles in your bathroom cabinet to trick nosy guests.) I wish Amy was the next door neighbor who would invite me over for fancy themed dinners and stop by with cupcakes and homemade lemonade on Sunday afternoons. In Montreal we had Mr. Piedlourds as a neighbour, and in Alberta most of our neighbours are strangers. Would you take cupcakes from a stranger?

Actually, I might. But they’d need to have a LOT of colourful icing.

If I can’t sway you to buy the book  (for yourself, a friend… your grandmother), maybe Amy can. Here she is in her own deliciously wacky promotional video.

Amy talks about two things a lot in her book: cheese balls and her rabbit. Maybe you have some time this weekend to make a cheese ball for your family. You can follow along as she makes them on Martha Stewart right here. I wish I had both these things, except I am poor and can’t afford cheese at the moment, and Chris is allergic to every conceivable animal. So, in honour of Easter, let’s take a peak into the world of Amy’s Easter Bunny-ish cupcake store. If I lived nearby I would visit every single day.

However, since I do not live nearby I decided to celebrate Easter another way. I visited every single candy store in town, and bought something gooey from every stop.Wooo! There are pics from the Sugar World Tour right here (and to your right if you click that little Flickr image.)

Hope you all have a great Easter weekend eating hams, perogies, cakes and cookies with your Mums!

xo Sarah