Summer

Coltrane

Every day when I get home from work,this little guy is meowing behind the door, having no patience for my jingling keys to fit into the lock and release him into the garden he has been watching all day.

Coltrane loves the courtyard. He is an indoor cat, only because of the positioning of our apartment building between too many roads and apartment buildings. So after screwing a couple BBQ grates to the fence, blocking off all the escape routes (that's ghetto, i know) we can let Coltrane roam freely in the courtyard.

He knows where his little Cat Nip plant is, and he monitors its progress daily. By that, I mean, I feed him a leaf and he repeatedly tries to get the rest!

Yucca plant

This is a Yucca plant my neighbour pulled out of his front flower bed, and handed over the fence to me, to add some vegetation to my patio area. It didn't look so good, but I watered it daily with hope that it would pull itself alive again. Again nature proved its strength and after cleaning up the dead spikes and giving it some fresh soil, it has begun to sprout new spikes, and has become one of my favourite parts of the patio. It was a lesson for me, to never give up on a plant, because it may surprise me.

Scarlett Runner Bean

This one bloom is about 6 feet off the ground, just enough to keep it out of the hungry mouths of carpenter ants. Which was the fate of the last few blooms. I started this plant from seeds in my living room, while the frost was still fresh outside. So I feel a great connection to how fantastic it has become. Plus, look at that colour!

Zucchini Flower

This is the first time I have ever grown a squash plant and I think I might have 10 next summer! I love these blooms! Not only to look at, but I have heard that it is very delicious to batter and fry them! This summer I only have 4 plants, and am looking forward to eating zucchini until I start looking like one, so I don't want to pick any blooms for frying.

What June passes on to July

June has been an amazing month for gardens. It has rained nearly every day giving life an easy start to the growing season. I have only had to fill my watering can a 'bakers dozen' times this entire month. Which is helpful because I fill up the watering can in my kitchen sink!

Herbs

Rain Rain thank you for all the herbs! Parsley and Dill made some pretty cool arrangements for my living room table, and Steve thought it made the place smell good!

So, I didn't know that Mint was a runner plant... Now I have lots of mint. Wow, mint, who knew?

The Berries deserve a Sift!

These strawberries are deserving of a fluffy waffle so I will give it to them.

The middle of June always means fresh STRAWBERRIES. When I was younger strawberries signaled the end of school, the beginning of long warm days, sleeping in past 9am and spending every minute outside.

Now that I am older, when my teeth plunge through a fresh Ontario strawberry, I remember those days in the strawberry patch, early, before the sun came up, eating as many strawberries as I packed into little pints with my Mom. I remember the diligent task it was to wash and remove the tops, boiling, jarring... for an entire year of fresh strawberry jam.

I bought these from a local farm, who pick their own berries every morning. I bumped into quite a few people I knew, all of us, patiently waiting in line to take our berries home. Mmmm and a little fresh maple sugar candy!

Beautiful strawberries like this and it being Sunday and all.... this means WAFFLES!

If you have noticed that waffles are a reoccurring item, its true. We eat them almost every weekend, because I can pack so much fiber into them, and they are so 'toppable'!


When mixing dry ingredients for anything you are making. You ALWAYS need to SIFT! I can't give enough praise to sifting. It is the best way to integrate the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, spices etc. It takes 8 seconds to sift, and boom! You have made a huge step towards a fluffy baked item. Sifting not only mixes the dry ingredients , it adds air and a lightness to the ingredients that can only be achieved through sifting. Even if you buy a prepackaged pancake mix, or cake mix, or anything. The ingredients have compacted while sitting on the grocery store shelf, so you need to SIFT those too!

That being said. Once you pour in your wet ingredients you want to maintain the light 'airyness' of the batter by FOLDING the ingredients with your spoon.


To fold, swoop your spoon down into the batter from one side to the other, running the spoon along the bottom, then dump the batter remaining on your spoon onto the top of the batter. Then take the spoon out, turn the bowl a bit and repeat. YES it takes longer and it seems silly to be so gentle to something you are going to bake at three hundred and fifty degrees or pour onto a scalding hot waffle iron, but DUDE it is super importanto!

With the combination of sifting and folding you will be blown away with the rise you will get out of your treats.

Exception: For cookies, I sift the ingredients but then I mix the cookie batter with my hands. I'm just crazy like that.

If you are watching your sugar intake or are a diabetic. I recommend substituting Agave Nectar for Maple syrup, or using a 50:50 ratio. Agave Nectar is a low glycemic sugar substitute that is 4 times sweeter than table sugar. You can mix it in with recipes as a great natural sweetener!

Waffle or Pancake Mix

1 cup Whole Spelt Flour
3 tbsp Flax seed, ground
1/4 cup Xylitol
1 1/2 tsp Baking powder
1/8 tsp Salt
1/2 cup Almond milk
1/3 cup Apple sauce or pured banana
3 tbsp Olive Oil
2 Eggs
Cinnamon, to taste

• In a large bowl, SIFT the flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon together
  
• In a medium sized bowl, mix all remaining ingredients together.
• Add wet to dry and fold ingredients together until just combined.

If making waffles in a circular Belgian waffle maker, this recipe should make about 3 waffles

ENJOY!

Life all around

The first bloom of a pepper plant.

I joined a Community Garden when Spring first hit. I felt a need inside me to grow plants, to feel seeds and soil and water in my hands. I think the winter hurt my soul! I know that's harsh, but that WAS a harsh winter, and my first real winter in the city on a side street with no 4 x Wheel drive!

The Community Garden was great, but I didn't truly realize the distance I would have to drive to get to it. The positive environmental factors of gardening were outweighed by the negative environmental factors of driving my car.

So, with a spark of enthusiasm I loaded up with soil and planters and plants and damnit I made my own garden!

Coltrane enjoys it too!

A few tomato, pepper and zucchini plants make up the bulk of the veggies. I also have some sweet and savory herbs to compliment my food all summer long. Scarlett runner beans are training their way up twine against the fence and a few flowers have mixed into the garden as well.

The 'Courtyard' as it is called, at our apartment, was completely forgotten by everyone before we moved in. A rickety old back deck and over grown weeds camouflaged the back area of its potential beauty. We jumped on the area and claimed it as our own. Hours of weeding and arranging and loving the space has really made it what it is today.

I feel very lucky to have this space. We just rent an apartment on the ground floor with no balcony or anything. So the fact that we have this secret little space all to ourselves is such a gift.

Bird house Gourd sprout

Squirrels + Cayenne = plants are safe

City Squirrels are limited to small patches of vegetation, so my garden was quickly a HOT SPOT! No neon sign required to advertise my fresh soil... it was dug up every afternoon without missing a beat. But! A little sprinkle of cayenne pepper over the soil and they have not touched it since. You do have to sprinkle more after it rains but its an inexpensive and natural way to keep them at bay.

When the tomato's and peppers start to arrive I will have to try a solution of hot sauce, dish soap and water in a spray bottle. Spraying this on the fruit is said to be a good way to keep the squirrels from stealing what isn't theirs.

I should say here, that Squirrles have a very good sense of smell, and do not like to experiment with spices! So if your going on a date with one stick to the produce isle and skip the shawarma hut!

I am also going to get a small bird bath, to offer the squirrels some water, because it is said that they steal tomatoes because they are thirsty.

Either way, I have my own garden. What should I name it?

Out! Out with you, thoughts!

For the sake of being, I am being. For the sake of living, I am living. Negative thoughts be out, positive light be in. Make it go, stop, bring, let live, and all that is in between.

When I put my hands to paper, the things that spew fourth are too quick for even my nimble fingers to put in the right order. Letters rearranged, misspelled and misplaced. But the thoughts are in order; the breaths are taken in strides, to give me enough oxygen to keep my mind going. But my mind works on an unimaginable scale. It never stops; it breaks down even the simplest thoughts into a thousand sections. Am I blowing up these small thoughts into more than they are, or am I truly giving them the justice they deserve?

It doesn’t make sense. It makes perfect sense to me. Steve is my daily ear, the large funnel I pour everything into where my thoughts are sifted and strained through his ears and his eyes. I think non-stop, which leads to the assumption that I should be a genius, with all these wheels and cogs spinning in my brain. You see, I don’t channel my thoughts; I let them run a muck, wander, infusing every micron of useful space with thoughts. I wish my metabolism worked on such a rampant scale, but that is another thought, for another day.

Meditation, calming of the mind? These words sound wonderful, just saying them makes me think…….. and those thoughts lead to more thoughts. Like links given on a web page of interest, if you click and follow enough of them, you will find yourself on a completely different subject.

I fight my mind on a daily basis. Not the good thoughts, I love those, I feed on those. Sometimes those good thoughts make me stop moving, make me tilt my head back and absorb the moment. I take a deep breath, I look around, and a smile comes over my face. I mean to say that, even with all these thoughts running like rabid gerbils’ on a wheel, I am still able to stop and hold a thought. Like pulling the winning ballet out of a box and knowing instantly that this one should be paid attention to. I hold down a full time job so I must be good at paying attention and focusing right? Maybe, who knows, ask my boss.

The fight I am talking about is with the thoughts that do me no good. The thoughts that I can identify as being useless. Think of thousands of fruit flies mulling over scraps in the compost bowl on the counter. Those scraps used to be whole, and useful, and you used them, enjoyed them to their fullest and wish to never see them again. But those fruit flies appear out of nowhere and soon there are thousands of them. But when you remove the source of their attention they disappear. My no good thoughts sometimes control me. They hold the strings and I am their puppet. Nothing I do can help me take hold of those strings. If it sounds like quite a fight, you’re right.

Caffeine is my personal enemy. It ruins my nails, the inside of my mouth… I chew, a lot, when my heart is racing. But my mind, races along for the ride as well.

What do you say to someone who thinks too much? I hear it a lot. “Don’t think about it”, Let it go” Coming from someone who is not in the exact same mental space as me, this sounds like fun, but not something realistically attainable. Like right now, while I am typing this, on the side, I am thinking about how I can pull big words out of my butt and type them in a matter of seconds, but when I am forming simple sentences, I can’t seem to spit the words out I want to say. I roll my eyes around in my head, hoping the word will come, and when it doesn’t I retreat from trying and use a less fancy word, and then brew over how that word did not properly portray what I was trying to convey.

I look pretty normal to the outside world. But on the inside, that’s where the crazy party is. Sometimes I will start talking and Steve won’t have a clue what I am talking about because the first half of the thought occurred only in my mind, and by the time my lips caught up with the cue to speak, I was half way done saying what I wanted to say. I am not a ‘fast talker’ though, I am not a jabber box, and I am not a chatty Kathy. I’m telling you, I seem normal. What ever that means!

Bah, sounds exhausting eh? It is. It is.

I have a deep plummeting witch’s brew of inherited genetic information from my parents that has given me all these complexes, I’m sure. I am even now, still figuring myself out, and trying to separate who I really am, from who I was born being. The ultimate study of Nature vs. Nurture. If you are not familiar with this concept you could look up my Grade 12 English teacher and he might make you write an essay on it. But basically it is the comparison of two theories. The theory of Nature being that we are born who we are. And the theory of Nurture being that we are who we are based on our upbringing and society itself. Cool eh? I think I am 50/50 or 40/60. There are a lot of daily contributing factors to my opinion on this topic.

The thoughts I have, though plentiful, are organized. They don’t sound like static, or bump into each other in my mind; I am too organized for that to happen. I think the strength of my organizational skills stems from almost a quarter century of colour coding and filing my thoughts and memories like ‘areas of interest’, and ‘thoughts on the go’. I wish I had a mental recycling bin, that with a click of a button, I could empty at will. Because I never forget, anything, ever. Don’t judge, it’s got me this far and if I could stop it, I would. I am tough, because I have learned from all those things I have never forgotten. I probably mull over those old thoughts once and while, debate over the results, and then tuck them back into their folders to grow dusty while a new days worth of thoughts and memories floods in.

You wonder how I get anything done. Me too.

What was I talking about when I started this?

And yet with all this mental yammering it is clear to me what things are most important in my life. I make time for the small things. I take time for things. I feel no guilt for putting my time where it is needed. I think about the people I love more than anything else. Sometimes even, the thoughts I fight give me a greater appreciation for the thoughts I love. The thoughts I love are my own. They are not in a file; they float, behind my eyes. So when I look out into the world, the thoughts I love tint the world a sunny shade of goodness, which guides me through my days with ease.

Maybe I have an odd balance, and maybe that odd balance makes me who I am. Maybe is all I need. Because there is still so much more to think about.

Shiny new things!

Stainless steel is my best friend, its shiny, sleek, sexy and clean! This Mothers day my Mom surprised 'me' with a gift of this great electric mixer (which also comes with a whisk attachment). Its funny because I have been making alot of merigune lately and groaning over the fact that whisking fluffy peaks by hand is probably as energy consuming and exhausting as climbing Mt. Everst! And then BOOM, my Mom hands me a mixer! Its a sign! I must be destined to master the art of whipping egg whites, and this is the tool I shall use to accomplish this great goal!

#1 Read instructions
#2 Turn on to see how fast speed level 1 is
#3 Get scared at how fast it is and hang mouth wide open at the fact that it can get even faster!
#4 Mix brownie batter
#5 Turn mixer up to speed level 5 and SCREAM at how fast it is!
#6 Unplug, lick batter off mixers and smile at my new toy

I usually fold all the ingredients together gently until just combined, which help them cook up all fluffy, but I HAD to use my new toy!

I will add the recipe for these brownies tonight!