A long time coming…

Okay, so I obviously owe anybody who has actually been reading my blog an apology.  Because I haven’t posted in like, a month.  There are various excuses for this, which include:

a) being out of town for various stints of time to do things like go visit family, go to Hillside festival, go to Muskoka, and just do the sorts of things that people like to do when it is July.

b) not being able to find my camera cord and therefore not being able to upload any photos to my computer to include in a post.

Anyways, I do apologize, and I very much intend to continue updating regularly now that I have found my camera cord and will be more around in this hot, humid, sweaty city.

So please accept my apology, and onwards!

I haven’t made a lot of things of note lately, so I think I’ll talk a bit about some of the little food projects I’ve done recently.

So I’ve been trying to grow some foods on my lil balcony this year.  I got a few yellow beans and one or two peas earlier this spring/summer, but now those plants seem to have withered and some died with the heat of this summer.  My kale and my tomatoes are still flourishing though.  And my tomatoes have finally started to ripen! I’m growing Golden Nugget cherry tomatoes, which I started from seeds from Urban Harvest.  I’ve started picking some and it’s really satisfying, though I don’t think they’re my favourite tomato variety.  I think next year, when I have a south-facing balcony at my new apartment, I will try and grow a variety that needs more sun and maybe will be one that I like a bit more.  But these little guys are still great.

Next, I’ll tell you about the dinner that Paul and I made the other night.  It wasn’t really anything particularly fancy, but it was so so delicious.  It was on the holiday Monday, the holiday known by a million different names – everything from the simple “Civic Holiday” to “Simcoe Day” to “Alexander Mackenzie Day” in my hometown of Sarnia.  Anyways, it was a nice day and we decided to have a sort of BBQ styles supper, but since neither of us eat meat it would be altered slightly.  But we had really delicious corn on the cob, some of which had been bought at a regular grocery store in Huntsville last week, and some of which came in my CSA last week.  We also made mashed potatoes, and a REALLY good mushroom-miso gravy that I’m not entirely sure how I made it so damn good, but it was really really good.  And then we had these BBQ tofu sandwiches, and they had iceberg lettuce on them, since that came in my CSA last week as well.  I have a total love affair with iceberg lettuce.  I know that it probably has no nutritional value, and it doesn’t really have much flavour and it isn’t in any fancy mesclun mix salads and whatnot, but it is SO crunchy and SO SO refreshing.  I love it.  And there is something about having iceberg lettuce on a sandwich with mayo that just tastes simultaneously amazing and also gives me that feeling that I’m eating some kind of junk food, even if I’m not really.  It’s like a McChicken, or the cheese sandwiches I used to eat when I couldn’t find anything else I wanted to snack on in my parents’ house.  Anyways, it was a delicious BBQ dinner, and even Kat watched us eat and said “Oh wow, you really did make a BBQ dinner, good for you guys!”

Ah, yes. Kat, the delightful Kat Burns gets an honourary blog mention here because she recently returned from her Western Canada tour with a gift for me.  She herself even proclaimed that she almost never buys gifts for people, but that she made an exception in this case, which made me feel very special.  This is what she got me:

How perfect is that? She got it at this place in Winnipeg, which sounds like a great little place.  I think when I move into my new place I will put this up in my kitchen.  My new kitchen.  I am moving out of this lovely house where I’ve lived for two years to live all on my own, and I’m looking forward to it though I will also be sad to go.  But my new kitchen is a serious downgrade.  Last night I found myself reading the tips on Smitten Kitchen about how to make the most of your small kitchen and looking at the photos on her page, I think my new kitchen is almost identical.  I’m moving from having a lot of counter space and shelving space to having barely any counter space at all.  I won’t have room for a real table and chairs in my new kitchen. And, perhaps worst of all, I’m moving from having a giant full-sized gas stove to having one of those 3/4 size ELECTRIC stoves.  Sigh.  The up-side is that I will have a full-sized fridge all to myself, which I can barely fathom.  But it will be an interesting transition, and I will keep you all posted with how I cope with it.

And last, but certainly not least, I ventured into a new realm of preserving yesterday.  Thus far, I’ve only made jams.  Jam is the easiest thing to preserve, because fruit is so high in acid and so there’s little risk of spoiling and there’s so few ingredients.  But yesterday I made PICKLES.  Yup, pickles.  I’m not supposed to open the jars for two whole months! That is allegedly how long it takes the flavours to mingle and mellow, but it’s going to be difficult to wait that long.  I made five jars of dill pickles, and 2 jars of dilled beans, and I may pickle more things yet.  It was very easy, and very satisfying.

So that’s all for now folks, I hope I haven’t lost all interest there ever was in this blog, and I leave you with promises of many more posts to come soon.  Like PIE! Stay tuned…