Garlic marshmallows

We thought it would be fun to learn to make marshmallows. Then we thought it would be fun to make cool, fruity or hipster flavours of marshmallows. Then we thought ... garlic marshmallows! With some product development, these might be the next big thing at the Garlic Festival!

We used a standard marshmallow recipe: 4 Tbsp. gelatin, 3/4 + 3/4 cups water, 2 cups sugar, 1 Tbsp. corn syrup, 2 egg whites, and we puréed four cloves of roasted garlic into the water that we dissolved the gelatin in. 

They're ... well, they're marshmallows. They toast up beautifully. And they're quite palatable and tasty, in the way that you might agree that garlic ice cream (another novelty item that's been known to sell quite well around here on the 2nd weekend of September) is surprisingly yummy.  

They may or may not make it to market for 2014, but they've been enjoyed here on a touch-of-fall evening, the night before Erin leaves for Montreal.

Bokashi experience so far

Last fall we started using a bokashi waste system. All food waste, including meat, bones, dairy and small amounts of oil and fat, went into a plastic 5-gallon bucket with a lid, combined with sprinkles of a microbial starter. We used a potato masher to pack down the waste as it accumulated, creating a fairly anaerobic environment. Once a bucket was packed full, we sealed it off from ambient oxygen and left it for at least a couple of weeks and started a new bucket.

After 2-4 weeks, the bokashi fermentation would be complete, Todd the Bokashi Guy told us. We took him at his word, but having seen the stuff coming out of the community bins at last fall's Harvest Festival it was hard to believe that much had actually happened. The food looked almost the same as when it had gone into the bucket. It smelled worse, to be sure -- a combination of vinegar and vomit, maybe? -- but the colour and structure was pretty much preserved.

Really, Todd? I thought. Well, let's work on the assumption that you're right. We'll assume that some sort of invisible process has occurred, and this stuff is really mostly digested like you say, appearances to the contrary. If you're right it'll turn into fully finished compost in days rather than weeks once we get it into the garden.

So all winter we fermented our food waste. When all three buckets filled we emptied the oldest of them in the compost area beside the garden to await spring. We piled on some dried leaves, and hoped beyond hope that once the pile warmed up in the spring we wouldn't end up with a party of bears and cougars feasting off a massive yummy pile of table-scrap soup.

And so now the weather is warm. And the verdict?

Todd was right!

Today I took the fork out and probed through the heap which has received a total of about forty gallons of food waste over the past seven months. The two most recent five-gallon additions to this pile were 4 weeks ago and 3 days (yes, days!) ago. I haven't done much mixing other than piling on some leaves, so I expected to see Monday's food sitting right below the top layer of leaves in all its colourful slimy glory. But no: there is an occasional recognizable bit of citrus fruit rind from the most recent addition, but other than that the pile is black gold.

And ... this has been our best spring in recent memory when it comes to bears. As far as I know we haven't had a single ursine creature lingering on our property. The dog agrees.

So yeah, bokashi for the win, I say!

Bob

It was the morning before I had to leave for Kelowna to pick up Erin. Noah, Fiona and Sophie had to be got up, the lunches had to be made, everyone had to be fed, coffee had to be made and drunk, suitcases had to be packed for Fiona and me for the overnight, art class supplies and sewing machine had to be readied for the morning's class. In other words, it was the usual chaos plus a bit more. And of course the chicken feed and water had to be topped up before I left. Ten minutes before we all had to depart, I ran out to water the chickens, and saw something leap up towards the fenced roof of the outdoor chicken run.

And there he was: this guy. About twice the size of a house cat, meaty and substantial with strength and claws and attitude to match. He was trapped there, startled by my presence. I couldn't see how he'd gotten in, but getting out wasn't proving to be easy.

I saw no blood or feathers around, and the chickens usually stay inside the coop where it's warmer, so I wondered if he had maybe just arrived. Perhaps the chickens were still alive, cowering inside. Regardless, I wanted to get him out. I cracked the gate to the outdoor chicken run, just wide enough to admit a camera lens, and took this photo. He growled, hissed and growled some more.

I cracked the gate a little wider and then went around to the far side of the coop, prodding him from behind with a long stick in an effort to encourage him to leave through the gap I'd left him in the gate. He was spitting mad and didn't want to move. But finally he made a grand leap and ran for it: straight through the little chicken door and into the coop.

I suppose I wasn't thinking entirely sensibly. I was only thinking of the poor chickens that he might be about to kill. So I ran around to the coop door and quickly opened it, peering into the relative dark, hoping that my appearance would scare him out the little flap-door at the back by which he had come in.

The image was like a split-second landscape revealed by a flash of lightning. I saw, and I slammed the door shut, only really understanding what I had seen after the door was closed. I had seen chicken carcasses: it was already all over for our rooster and four hens who had been faithfully contributing lovely blue-green-shelled eggs to our pantry for a year and a half. But I had also seen the cat, a mere 14 inches from my face, sitting in the nesting box closest to the door, growling his horrid growl, crouched upon his deadly claws.

We now had two minutes until we had to leave for school/art class/Kelowna. Like any reasonable person would, I spent that two minutes uploading the photo to Facebook (thereby alerting Chuck) and then simply drove away, trusting that the cat would eventually leave by the open gate. Which it seems he did.

We dealt with the chicken carcasses another day. I suppose we'll be back to raising new chicks this spring.

Bike bridge

Our property is ideally situated to avoid logging, development or loss of privacy. We own a mere 2.5 acres (1.0 Ha) but the surrounding crown land is heavily forested, but steep and creeky -- not suitable for logging. Above us runs the highway, and a long way down a 45- to 60-degree slope is a regional park, so no risk of anything man-made growing up in either of those directions. Which is lovely, except that it makes it almost impossible to create any trails that start at our place and connect up with anything. We're prisoners of our terrain. Our small area of more moderate grade is all we've got to work with. 

So Fiona and I decided that if we can't hook into the nearby cross-country trails from our property, we could at least create some sort of interesting circuit to make use of on our bikes. We have dreams of a reticular network of tiny trails connecting obstacles, jumps, skinnies, ramps and whatever else we can dream up. Today, with Chuck's help we got started. We used two 18' cedar logs to span a small gully. Then Fiona got busy with hammer, nails and a bunch of cedar decking recycled from our old deck.

In less than an hour we had completed the bridge. Fiona got up her courage: the access at the far side comes from a short but steep slope. She made it across without any difficulty!

Dandelion syrup

About 6-8 cups of dandelion flowers yielded about 1 cup of packed yellow petals. We mixed this with 2 cups of sugar and 2 cups of water, brought to a simmer and allowed to cook for an hour or so, gradually reducing in volume to a syrupy consistency. Then we added the juice of one small lemon, strained out the petals, and cooled.

It tastes wonderful! Like spring sunshine mixed with honey and lemon. Delicious on ice cream.

Hello, trees

Fiona and I have been visiting the trees in the forest that surrounds our home recently, appreciating them anew as they emerge from the snow and prepare for a new season of growth.

Yesterday we checked out the red cedar bark, which we will use for basket weaving. Years ago the kids did a workshop with this lovely local lady, and while they're a lot of work, the tiny baskets we have since made have been very striking and rewarding. It's still too early in the season for it to come away easily in long strips, but we're looking forward to harvesting some in May. We then dug up some red cedar roots, to decide how useful they'd be for embellishing our baskets. I had read that they make great sewing material, but had never taken the suggestion seriously. They really are amazing. The slenderest ones are strong, pliable and lovely to look at, and they dry and increase in strength very quickly once harvested.

We collected armloads of white pine cones to use a fire-starter next winter.

And then we made our acquaintance again with the birch trees. We tapped a couple of birch trees years ago, but our sap collection set-up wasn't ideal and we didn't get enough sap to make a proper syrup. Because birch sap is about five times less sugary than maple sap, you need a heck of a lot of it!

Sometime in the intervening years I managed to purchase four spiles and today we picked up some clear 1/2" tubing at the local hardware store. All it took was a quick bit of work with the portable drill and a couple of taps with the mallet the trees began spilling their sap out for us with eagerness. We plugged a couple of tubes into each of two glass carboys and within an hour or two had a couple of gallons of sap.

I imagine it will be incredibly time- and energy-consuming to boil the stuff down, but I'm happy to do it just once, to experience the process and the taste of the syrup.

Birch sap is sterile and contains trace amounts of minerals, xylitol and various other good things. It's actually a great source of safe drinking water. Not that we don't already have safe drinking water, but hey, when civilization crumbles, this might be a useful piece of knowledge.

Festivus

Erin arrived from China a week ago. She'd been there on tour with her orchestra and was on her way back to Montreal, by way of "home" in the Kootenays for a week or so. She had picked up a killer cold in China and spent the better part of the week recovering from that and from the loss of a day and a night or two what with the jetlag, dateline, red-eye flight and the inevitable sleep deprivation of a tour. She brought back photos of the terra cotta army and the Great Wall, as well as of smoggy cities, video arcades in dodgy underground plazas where she fascinated the Chinese teens with her mastery of the motocross game or some-such, markets, plazas, beaches and the like.

I killed chickens. After being vegetarian for the better part of 20 years and having two or three other avowed veg-heads in the family, I was betrayed last summer when both Erin and Sophie decided to start eating meat. My own vegetarianism suddenly seemed like rather a large family inconvenience. So I decided that if I could make my peace with the whole farmyard to table business by immersing myself in it, I'd feel okay about parting from my vegetarian ways. The task I set myself was to kill our own surplus chickens. I selected three of our now-maturing roosters, inverted them in a killing cone so that they settled into somnolence, cut their jugulars, bled them out, dipped and plucked and gutted and dressed them. Into the freezer they went.

We ate one as part of our Festivus Fondue Feast, along with plenty of cheese and veggies and some venison sausage from a friend. I'm not sure I would have been ready to eat it right after the butchering, but the couple of weeks in the freezer allowed some emotional distance for me. I ate it. It was yummy. I feel like an honest carnivore now.

Festivus was great. It snowed a delicious 35 cm of light-as-a-feather white snow overnight and through the day. It was the first big snowfall in a couple of weeks. "It's another Festivus miracle!" said Fiona.

I worried that the lack of all the decorations and music and traditional Christmas rituals would keep it from being special enough, but it was fine. We started the day with fresh-baked cinnamon buns. We opened gifts. Fiona gave me a set of six computer-printed coupons for Free Massages courtesy of herself (she gives great massages!). She imprinted my name on them so they couldn't be stolen and redeemed by other family members. "And," she warned me, "I deleted the file on the computer so you couldn't print any extras." She's got really good business sense, this girl!

The Fondue Feast was swiss cheese to start with veggies and meat, and then chocolate with fruit to finish. After the Feast, we held the Airing of Grievances during which, according to the Seinfeld episode in question, "you state all the ways that your family members have disappointed you over the previous year." Kind of a dangerous place to go, but the kids handled it with humour and sensitivity and a sense of good fun. I'm thankful we never got to the feats of strength, though there had been talk of tickle fights in lieu.

Then we finished the evening by listening to Erin practice the Bach Chaconne in the kitchen.

Holidays 2011

There was no Christmas in this family. We went to my mom's and ate her turkey. But other than that, no Christmas. We're waiting for Erin to get back from China next week, when she'll stop in for a week's visit.

Irish Cream. We've been making it, 3 litres at a time and enjoying it a tiny glassful each of us each night after dinner. It needs to be refrigerated, but our fridge was very full, so we put it on the deck. One day there was only one jar there. We looked around and found an empty jar on the snow on the lawn with the lid chewed off. The dog was discovered to have a very raw-looking (much-licked) snout and a complacent demeanour. We have made more room in the fridge.

Chuck bought a big TV. We had been using an old 27" model that was deeper than it was wide. Now we have a wall-mounted 46" expanse of perpetual programming. I suppose the novelty will wear off and it'll get shut off from time to time. It'll be nice for DVDs and such, but so far it's not talking very well to the input components and we're waiting for a swanky HDMI cable that's on order.

Human Planet. Great new BBC series we've been watching, similar to Planet Earth and Life but focused on human adaptations and innovations in extreme environments. Looking forward to watching it on the TV. For now, my iMac suffices.

We killed animals. My way of making peace with no longer being a vegetarian (since I was the last holdout non-meat-eater in the family). I figured that if I could kill some of our chickens with my own hands and eat them, I could then eat meat in good conscience, in full appreciation of the ethical and practical implications. So today we killed our excess roosters.

I've been running. I managed to do 53k last week, plus some crosstraining. This week will be busier, so fewer miles, but I'm off to a good start.

The kids are back to school tomorrow. We'll celebrate Erin's birthday next weekend, Festivus the following weekend and Fiona's birthday the weekend after that.

Mosaic table in process

Fiona and I have been working on the mosaic table top. The other day we put the adhesive mortar on and set the tile on the backer board. In this photo you can see today's progress.

Top left shows the tiles with no grout. Top right shows the first application of grout. This has hardened now (but not cured) so we have been able to clean and buff the tiles to bring out their colour and sheen again. Along the bottom you can see the part we just finished. Here the tiles are still hazy and dirty.

We'll probably need to buy another packet of grout to finish it, but it's coming along nicely and hopefully we'll have it done in a few days.

Mosaic tile table

 

We have a serious lack of deck furniture. We're getting by with fifteen-year-old resin chairs that were intended as a short-term solution when we bought them. When we completed our lovely new deck and couple of years ago the aesthetic mismatch became almost nauseating. We've had our eyes out for a suitable set for a couple of years now, but just haven't found it at the right moment, for the right price, when we're in the right big city with a vehicle (i.e. Chuck's truck) that could haul the stuff over whatever mountain passes would be required to get it home.

A month ago Chuck had some cedar left over from re-roofing the little cabin and threw together a basic but surprisingly attractive bench. So I figured maybe the answer after all these years is just to make stuff ourselves.

With that possibility in mind, I perked right up when I saw a lovely mosaic table in someone's living room last month. I procured some photos, had Chuck make up an octagonal coffee table and last weekend after dispatching Erin headed to the Universal Slate warehouse in Calgary for some stone tile.

Sophie, Fiona and I did a preliminary layout of tiles and stones and found objects one afternoon. The actual tile-setting and grouting will have to wait another few days, but I think it's going to look pretty great. Stay tuned for more photos.

They're growing up!

The chickens, that is.

They're a little over two months old now, our dozen Ameraucanas. We got them as fluffy little day-olds and have successfully grown them through their lanky pre-adolescent phase. They're now feathering out resplendently and there's such variety! They all have the jowly ear-tufts and blue-grey legs and feet characteristic of their breed, but we have everything from white-with-grey to deep brick-red-and-black to golden yellow, black and brown.

We seem to have a pretty even mix of pullets and cockerels. We will need to choose just one cockerel to raise to rooster-dom. There's one that looks a lot like Skunk, or favourite-ever chicken. He's even got the green-black iridescence starting to show on his tail feathers. At this point there are a couple of front-runners (based on personality and colouration) but I'm not ready to choose yet.

Nestlings

Ever kid should have a nest of baby birds to watch every year.

Holidays

I slept in this morning! We were up late last night, and today had absolutely nothing scheduled.

Last night was the community choir concert. Sophie is doing her first season with the ensemble. Unfortunately she was put in the middle riser so that her sense of pitch could help those in the first row. Which probably benefitted the auditory appeal of the concert, but meant that she alone amongst the choir was totally hidden. I could occasionally catch a glimpse of her shoulder but that was about all.

Erin accompanied. It's a paid gig for her -- a not-insubstantial sum for learning a dozen and a half pieces in time for the first rehearsal and then attending every rehearsal as the choir gradually learns its parts and polishes things up. She did fabulously! She's exquisitely sensitive, manages a kajillion page-turns totally on her own, plays musically and knows exactly when to take the bull by the horns and railroad the choir into melodic and rhythmic cohesion.

It was the choir's 25th Annual Christmas Concert. My dad sang with them for a few years before his death in 2003. Then Erin sang with it for two years, and Noah for one, before they both defected to Corazón. The choir director throughout those 25 years has been the wonderful woman who took Erin to S.E. Asia two years ago. So it's great that Sophie is now taking her turn with them, and that Erin has come back to support it as the accompanist. The choir  is a good one for a community so small and it has a lot of heart, and personality. It even inspired a funny and touching chapter in Caroline Woodward's latest novel. It was a lovely concert, and there was a fabulous community potluck dinner / party in the hall afterwards, with kids running around, people with canes and wheelchairs, old folk, young parents, lots of hugging and singing of carols around the piano.

And now there's almost nothing on the schedule for the next week. Chuck works, Erin has one shift at the café. I teach a few violin lessons and work a morning at the clinic. But no group classes, choir rehearsals, Summit String rehearsals, no trips out of town for lessons or orchestras, no violin lesson for my kids, no driving Erin to and from school.

Today I did some more work rehabilitating the rink from last week's thaw. There's a nasty four inches of crusty snow on top of an inch and a half of frozen slushy stuff that adhered to the rink surface. And the dog walked through it at some critical juncture, making nasty bumps and potholes. It's taken me hours to get it shovelled off, and it will require a few more floods to be back to its smooth state of glory from earlier in the month. Oh well, it will be worth it.

And we started in on the gingerbread house. We used to do some sort of gingerbread construction every year, but we let this habit lapse and I hadn't realized how long it had been: Fiona has no memory of ever decorating a gingerbread house! I know we've done this since she was born, but I guess the last time she was too young to really appreciate it. So it was high time. Sophie and Fiona were, as usual, workhorses in the kitchen, managing huge amounts of the work themselves.

Then to top it off, Noah cooked pasta dinner for us all.

Outside at our place

From daylight to dusk and through into the night. Ridiculous games, obstacle courses, conversation and laughter. Friends over, various combinations of siblings. And the smell of baking bread, to boot.

Backyard Skating

I got three floods in before dusk and then had to deal with dinner and group class. When I got home it had started to snow a bit. Sophie and I went to check the rink out and decided that with it already pretty smooth in most places we didn't want to flood and ruin the surface by having snow stick to it as it froze.

We got ready to go back inside and try again later. But then I took a look at what we already had: most of a rink, and pretty solid and smooth in the middle. So I called it: "Let's skate!" What the heck. The surface wasn't perfect but why wait another day?

So there was a mad scrambling for skates. Fiona had already skated at the arena in Nakusp with some friends once this year, so she was good to go. Sophie had tried on a pair of Erin's hand-me-downs earlier in the day. Erin had a good dig around for her skates and Noah found some that seemed to fit (probably an old pair of his dad's). Mine showed up. Then it was onto the gloves, snow pants, hats and such.

When we had cruddy carpet in our living room and dining room it was easy to get dressed with skates on in the living room and then walk to the front door and outside to the rink. But with cork in the dining area and hardwood in the living room we can't do that any more. Today we crawled across the floor, all five of us, out the front door, across the deck and down the ramp, across the patch of concrete next to the deck. There has got to be a better way! Perhaps we'll invest in some skate guards. Or brave the nasty cold on fingers and toes and lace up rinkside.

But we made it to the rink. And it was bliss. Cold wild bliss with shrieks and giggles. Noah traded skates with me; he got the better part of that deal! The dog did the Bambi thing on the ice, freaked out and ran away scared, satisfying herself for the rest of the evening by gnawing on chunks of ice on the lawn. Fiona got more confidence. Sophie got crazy. Erin lost the feeling in her fingers.

And now it's hot drink time. London Fogs and Coco Chai Rooibos.

It's stopped snowing, so I suppose I'll have to go out and flood again. After my tea.

The unprecedented November rink

We're not skating quite yet. There are still a few wrinkles and bumps in the corners and along the edges at the far end of the lawn where the ground is a bit higher. But I think another three or four floods will give us a passable surface on which to start skating.

With the temperature remaining below -9ºC (sometimes well below!) we can spend 45 minutes flooding, wait a mere hour for it to freeze hard, and go out with the hose again. We may be skating by tomorrow.

Seasons turning on a dime

A week ago I put the snow tires on only because I was driving a bunch of kids up and over the Monashee Pass, where I thought there might be snow. It's been a warm wet fall and if we hadn't been going over the pass I would have left the all-season tires on for another while yet: snow did not seem imminent.

But it finally did snow a couple of days ago, just a dusting, really. A little more up at our house, since we're 250 metres above the village. But nothing to get too excited about. We figured it was the normal sputtering start to wintry weather: a few days of flakes, then a couple of weeks of mud and more rain, then some more flakes and back and forth for a while. Typically by mid-December the snow settles on the ground for good. Sometimes a bit earlier, sometimes a bit later.

But Sophie alerted me to the 14-day extended weather forecast this morning:

The yellow line denotes zero, the freezing point. The normal daily highs and lows for the next two weeks are shown as two white horizontal lines at the top of the graph. You can see that they normally straddle the freezing point. The predicted daily highs and lows for the next two weeks are shown as the meandering pink and blue lines at the bottom of the graph. Way, way, way below normal over the next five days, and then remaining below normal for the full two weeks, not straying above the freezing point at all.

So we put the trampoline away today and got out the rink liner. We've never started on a rink until late December with skating following sometime in January, but this spate of arctic weather seems just too good to miss. We have a new tarp, purchased last fall but never used due to the spuriously warm winter we got in 2009-10. It's more than large enough, so we set up the contours of the rink to take advantage of the most level part of the yard. We'll see if we can actually manage a few days of skating in November.

The down side: I'm not at all sure about running barefoot at minus 22!

Fire and pizza

We tried the oven for pizzas last night. We don't yet have a pizza peel, so we stuck with small personal pizzas on pans. We got the fire good and hot for an hour or two first.

The oven is finally pretty much dry, thanks to three recent firings. We've got a bit of cracking, but nothing we won't be able to fill in with the top coat of cob and nothing that seems at all structural. 

After a couple of hours of fire, we raked the coals out. Chuck emptied them into a little grill he put together and used them to BBQ meat. The vegetarians just looked the other way and got on with the pizzas.

We inserted the pizzas and placed the wooden door in the opening. The door is just rough-cut at this point and doesn't fit very well. There's almost an inch gap at the top of the curve, which means the oven loses heat quickly. The first pan of pizzas took 6 minutes, the second 9 minutes and the third 15 or so. Hopefully once we have a fitted door our baking times won't escalate so quickly. Even so, our three successive batches took only a few minutes longer than it takes us to cook one batch in the electric oven.

The bottom crust is exquisite! Just what I was hoping for.

First firing

The weather has been unrelentingly cold and wet for the past three weeks. So the cob oven hasn't exactly dried out. The outer layer of the south-facing wall is partly dry: you can see the lighter colour in the right of this photo. But the rest of the outside, and all of the inside, is still damp. Not really wet, just not dry. And as fall settles in and the weather continues to cool down, I'm not hopefully that the oven will dry slowly and naturally.

It will probably crack a bit as it dries, and that cracking should ideally happen before we put on the last layer, so that we can cover and fill the cracks with it. And I'd love to get the last layer done this fall rather than next spring. Not essential, but I'm hankering for a sense of completeness.

So today we decided to fire the oven for a short time to speed the drying from the inside. We laid a fire inside and watched to see how much smoke there would be and where it would travel. At first there was lots and it blew straight at the kitchen door. But then as the fire heated up there was less, and it mostly blew up and over the house.

The spiders were amazing. There were hundreds of long-legged ones in residence on the outside of the dome. I suppose they like the texture. They got all excited when we made the fire, just from the activity of humans nearby, but they couldn't really figure out what to do. So for a while the dome was host to a milling crowd of excited arachnids. I don't mind spiders in the slightest, so I was quite entranced by the spider rave.

So far the dome hasn't exploded into dozens of super-heated fragments of hardened clay. Which is nice.

I'm currently looking for an old pre-digital-age TV satellite dish, a 6-foot diameter one. My plan is to use it to build a roof over the oven, mounting it dome up on vertical posts and then planting it with a living roof. All the pictures I've seen of lean-to or peaked roofs look completely incongruous with the round, organic shape of cob ovens. I think a round, grass-covered roof will look nicely hobbit-like.

Main cobbing done

The main cobbing is all complete on the oven now. The walls of the oven are about 8 1/2" (22 cm) thick. See how the cob has come out almost to the edge of the foundation all the way around? And yesterday I added a lip to the doorway. Cob is so easy and enjoyable to sculpt. No wonder the Build Your Own Earth Oven book is full of photos of sculptural ovens like this one. I like the look of the little rim, and it may serve to protect some of the detailing on the main oven from getting too sooty. There's no hurry to add the final top coat of smooth cob, though I'd love to get to it this fall sometime. Mostly now we just wait for the thing to dry out a bit before firing it up. The way the weather is these days (very cold and very wet), that's going to take quite a while. Today beans are baking in the indoor electric oven.