My Peace on Earth Project

This Christmas I'm wishing all of you and myself Peace.

Peace will emanate from us if we cultivate it in us.

Letting go of our striving, struggling and anger, we can touch the quiet eternal peace that is the foundation of this existence.

We can remember that we ARE content where we are at, and that we have more love in us than fear.

Merry Christmas

a little tree...

I've had birds on the brain lately, so decided to decorate my little living tree with some fake birds and a popcorn string, with dried cranberries, something to gift to the birds after the season is done. 

I killed my potted tree last year by letting it dry out, so this year I am trying out this neat trick, watering the tree with ice cubes. The cubes melt slowly, allowing more time for the water to penetrate the roots, and the coolness of the ice makes the tree feel like it is outside.

It is a Dwarf Albertan Spruce tree, so is ideal for containers, but will grow to 8ft if I plant it outside.

I hope to keep it alive for next year too...

It looks so sweet on my table

Cold Outside, Warm Inside

We woke to snow on Saturday. Vancouver hasn't seen snow in two years, so it was exciting. As the winter solstice is one month away and there is still snow on the ground, I was inspired to warm the inside of my house. Spices are my favourite to warm the senses, I always cook with copious amounts of ginger and cumin in the cold months, and we just automatically started drinking chai instead of orange pekoe as soon as the temperature dropped outside. I decided to follow the trend and make a part edible, part aromatic, part illuminating centerpiece for our table.

It worked out really nicely, I had two older mandarin's that I wasn't inspired to eat and a bag full of cloves from lasts years apple cider experiment. I pierced the oranges with the cloves in pretty designs, the juice from the orange reinvigorated the cloves, causing a gentle waft of aroma. I laid them on a bed of leftover U-pick Hazelnuts, and Walnuts I bought from this weeks Farmers Market, then I put them with some very old star anise, and some new pink pepper and cardamom pods, and voila! It smells amazing.

Hopefully it will inspire us to snack on the nuts in the coming days too.

Have a Peaceful, Warm and Spicy Full Moon!

World Urbanism Day!

Guanajuato, Mexico

Today is World Urbanism Day, and a chance to reflect upon how we are planning and building our cities. With over half of humanity currently living in cities, there is a huge potential to positively impact their ability to live well, sustainably, just by consciously planning the communities these citizens live in.

Our built environment plays a huge role in how our lifestyles develop. It is also one thing that is so easy to take for granted, because its almost too close to see. But these cityscapes were and are still being planned. And we are living with the consequences. 

I was interested to learn what a Food Desert (wikiFoodDesert) was, and then amazed by how many times I have been travelling through suburban Canada, gotten hungry and only found junk food to eat. City planners can increase the health and food security of their residents by planning for food co-ops, farmers markets, community gardens and urban farms.

Vancouver

 I'm also always a little in awe when I travel back to my hometown (Calgary) and see just how unbelievably inconvenient it is to live in that city without a car. Calgary is a new city and it was literally built for the automobile, the distances between places there are unimaginable to residents in larger, more cramped up places, as is the abundance of free street parking.

New York

New York has been a world leader of urban development for many generations, and lately they have been taking drastic measures to reduce vehicular traffic into the downtown core, by implementing bike lanes, improving transit and taking previous streets away and turning them into pedestrian boulevards, streets like the high profile Broadway stretch through Time Square, visit http://www.streetfilms.org/ to watch videos on other exciting projects world wide.

Vancouver City Hall

It must be an exciting time o be a city planner,  I know that Vancouver's city hall was up until midnight one night debating whether to implement a separated bike lanes downtown or not. They voted to do it!

I am so thrilled and grateful for the extra support this gives to us residents to live a simpler, healthier more sustainable lifestyle, by getting more people out of the loud, expensive, anonymous, poluting, speed machines and into the face to face community of pedestrian and cyclist traffic.

I should note, cars are great for intercity travel, its the within city travel that I feel annoys everyone, drivers included.

The First Winter Market

The Vancouver Farmers Markets have been steadily increasing in popularity over the last few years, not just in the summer months but over the Winter as well. In fact the winter market, which used to be held only twice a month in a small community hall, has grown this year into a weekly fair in the parking lot for Nat Bailey Stadium, which conveniently is in my neighbourhood.

My sister and I walked the baby over yesterday and found an abundance of farm fresh local food to tempt us. There were walnuts and hazelnuts, greens like dandelion and chicory, parsley, kale, broccoli sprouts, beats, carrots, spuds, apples, pears, mushrooms, squashes and so much more. I was surprised to even buy some of the last field ripened heirloom tomatoes of the season. I will be keeping an eye on what they continue to offer throughout the winter, and challenging myself to make a few meals out of whats in season. Go see them yourself at www.eatlocal.org

This is what we bought, it is $30 worth of veg, which may seem pricey but I look at it as 1 stir fry. 1 salsa, 2 salads and 1.5 dips, all made from ingredients so fresh that they can sit in my fridge for two weeks and still be fresher than what I buy a the supermarket. Doesn't strike me as overpriced.

First Winter Market Salad
Serves 6 Big Eaters

1 Large bunch Red Russian Kale
2 medium sized bulbs Florence Fennel sliced into matchsticks
2 small sized Beets sliced into thin halfmoons
1 lrg carrot sliced into thin disks
2 Shallots sliced into thin circles
1 Asian Pear, cored and cut into thin slices

Toss with
Apple Honey Mustard Dressing
Mix Well:
1 part Apple Cider Vinegar
1 part Olive Oil
Generous dallop of liquid Honey
Generous Squirt Dijon Mustard
Black Sesame Seeds for looks

The Farmhouse, finding space for foodcapes

City Gardens have City Neighbours, as I've mentioned before.
Check out the story of The Farmhouse, they are a group of roommates motivated to turn their rented garden into a foodscape paradise. Unfortunately one of their neighbours did not appreciate the aesthetic of their permaculture garden and called in the city to  make use of an archaic by-law Untidy Premises By-law no. 4548 which helps to restrict the type of landscaping residents of Vancouver can have in their lawns. I wonder if anyone has ever called in this by-law in regards to the plastic grass going in lawns around North Van?
Two Ends of the Spectrum.
 Vive el Jardin Libre!

Storing Seed until the Sping

The Harvest is now, mostly over. The seeds that I've intended to save have been taken in and dried for a week or two, and are now hard enough to chance surviving through to spring. How I store them will increase the chance of the seeds remaining alive through the winter.

They must be kept dry, because water activates them to come alive, and grow, not something that you want them to do this time of year. I collect packs of silica to keep them dry. Silica comes in boxes of almost anything manufactured in the tropics, so feel free to politely harass retail stores to keep some for you, I get mine from my partners Bike Shop, but electronic stores are also a good bet, or I've noticed they come with packs of Nori. Silica is also reusable, empty it out of the paper packages unto a baking sheet and dry it in the oven at a super low heat.

Most Seed you buy comes in paper envelopes, and you could make your own envelopes really inexpensively, but I prefer using clean small glass jars, like the type that used to house jam, or artichoke hearts. These keep my seed really protected and look so pretty.

Besides protecting your seeds from water you also want to consider protecting them from extreme heat, extreme cold and light. Some of the experts recommend keeping your seed in the fridge, but with three grocery shoppers in my house this is not possible. Instead, they will be stored in a box on a self in a cool indoor storage closet.

City Gardens, City Neighbours

I believe Urban Gardening offers a future to agriculture and civilization. But it doesn't come without its problems, most of which derive from the BIG problem we are all facing, WASTE (aka pollution, litter, garbage.)
Most people have heard of The Broken Window Theory, I feel that it very much applies to Urban Gardening.
Flower gardens and Food gardens are different in their function, but also in their appearance, and in the wintertime, a food garden can look a little disheveled. I have found it important to keep my food gardens looking clean and neat, just to keep the neighbours respecting them. Somehow, sometimes, it happens that I get a little behind on cleaning up a bed and making it look neat and maintained, it never seems to take long until the garbage begins to accumulate. This fall one of my neighbours seems to have mistook my dead stand of quinoa as an inviting dumping ground for their excess bamboo clippings, I guess their Yard Trimmings Bin was full.
Its a piss off when stuff like this happens, but a nice reminder to keep everything looking spruced up. Because it can get much worse, digging up and around broken beer bottles is common in city gardens, finding doggy bags (not from restaurants) and cigarette butts is expected. But this spring, we cleaned up a "hobo" nest that was across the alley from my garden, and we found needles in it. Not what you want to see near to where so many children play. We will clean up any extra garbage around because we want to show people we respect this space, and hope that they will too.

...Its like in Supermario World!

Amanita Muscaria! also called Fly Agaric

It looks unreal, like its made out of plastic, but its real, and it crops up all over lawns in Vancouver starting in mid September. However, it isn't really edible, well some types are (although probably not tasty) but others types are DEADLY. So look, love, but don't taste.

Fava Beans and Cover Cropping

Cover cropping is an old idea, that is gaining popularity as humanity begins to yearn for agricultural practices that do not poison the earth. Cover crops protect soil from erosion through the winter months by locking the soil down with their roots, they help add much organic material into the soil once you turn them in, and you can choose a cover crop that fixes nitrogen and helps fertilize your plants. 

The soil in my garden is high in clay, so I felt that the added organic matter a cover crop will provide could be useful. I chose to use Fava Beans because they fix nitrogen in the soil and they are relatively small plants that are easy to turn under with just a shovel, something a small time gardener, without a mechanical tiller, needs to consider. 

I bought the package at the West Coast Seeds head office in Delta, I bought enough to plant a small field. I also bought a legume seed inoculant, which is a manufactured form of the bacteria that fixes the nitrogen from the atmosphere for the fava beans. These bacteria will happen anyways where legumes are planted, but inoculating them ensures that there is an adequate supply so you can get the most nitrogen possible. It is a great learning experience any how.

Here are the Fava Beans

This is the inoculant in a jar with the beans and water

To coat the seed, just shake

They got planted in last season Quinoa bed, which will be the Mayan Garden next year, the corn should love the extra nitrogen

Walnuts

Walnuts, they are rich in omega-3s, full of protein and super tasty, not to mention extremely familiar to most palates, as they are grown in Europe, Asia and the Americas for both food, and wood.

On a recent visit to Galiano Island, I had a chance encounter with this lovely Walnut Tree, which just happened to be ready for the harvest.

This is the trunk, you can see holes drilled into it from the local Woodpeckers, trying to get at some bug inside the tree. Infestations are usually a sign that the plant is under stress, but this tree is old and fruiting, so I think it is only a minor concern.

These are the leaves.

Here is the fruit, bursting with a nut inside. I was amazed at how different Walnuts and Hazelnuts look like on the tree.

The grass was so long under the tree that it was tricky to see the nuts on the ground, so I had to "feel" them by gently treading over the area.

I got enough, and washed them up. I was warned to wash them with gloves on, because the preservative present in the fruit is strong and will dye your hands black for weeks.

I had to dry them next. This picture looks pretty, but remember, heat rises, so to be more effective, put the nuts you want to dry above the heat source.

After an hour and a half of shelling the walnuts (talk about slow food!) I had enough for my recipe, and I got so good a small miracle happened...

I extracted a walnut intact from its shell, not an easy thing to do.

As the nuts were still raw, and soft, I choose to put them in a raw recipe. My sistah Jill of illumination introduced me to Ani Phyo and the raw diet. I prefer raw foods in the warmer months, but this recipe of Ani's feels warm and fits fall very well.

Walnut Cranberry Squash "Rice"

1lb squash (I used a japanese Blue Kabocha that I grew in my garden)

1/2 small yellow onion

1tbs cumin seeds

1tbs coriander powder

1/2 cup cilantro leaves, chopped

1 cup dried cranberries

1 cup walnuts, crushed

2tsp sea salt

Put small batches of squash into the food processor at a time, processing into small pieces.

Put processed squash into large bowl, add rest of ingredients and mix well. 

Enjoy!

Hazelnuts

Hazelnuts are not only easy to find growing in northern areas, they are also one of the more distinctive tasting nut. They have a robust flavour that pairs well with both savoury dishes like mushroom pea stir fry, or, of course, in sweet concoctions, especially with chocolate, like nutella...

For Thanksgiving, my family and I drove to Aggasiz to the Hazelnut U-pick

You can visit them too at Hazelnut U-Picks

I was particularly interested in seeing the trees, because I know they are around Vancouver, and so being able to identify them would help my foraging abilities. But also because I had read that Hazel trees make the best garden stakes, and I understood why as soon as I saw how straight these offshoots are.

The Hazelnuts grow out of a flower, they are the center of the flower, and they harden on the tree,

then the nuts fall to the ground. I was surprised to learn that the nuts are harvested off of the ground.

Just like this.

We got 10lbs, which cost us 20$

Then, in honor of my sister, who got us both hooked on the stuff in France, I made nutella.

I followed a recipe from this sweet blog Su Good Sweets I will reprise it here for you.

Su Goods, Chocolate Hazelnut Spread

Yield: about 12 ounces (1 1/2 cups)

1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
2 cups whole raw hazelnuts
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/8 tsp salt

1. Preparation: Line a baking sheet with foil. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Make the caramel: Combine the sugar and water in a 3- to 4-cup saucepan. To prevent crystallization, don’t stir it again during the cooking. Cover and bring the mixture to a simmer over medium heat. Remove the lid and wipe down the sides of the pan with a wet pastry brush or a scrunched up paper towel dipped in water. Cover and cook for 2 minutes, or until the sugar’s completely dissolved. Uncover and cook until the syrup looks like pale amber maple syrup. If your pan’s dark and you can’t gauge the color of the syrup, spoon a drop or two onto a white saucer. Swirl the pan gently, continuing to cook and test the color until the syrup turns medium amber.
3. Immediately pour the caramel onto the lined baking sheet. Tilt the sheet to spread the caramel as thinly as possible. Let harden completely, about 15 minutes.
4. Toast the nuts: Meanwhile, place the hazelnuts in a single layer on a baking sheet. Toast in the oven until the skins are almost black and the meat is dark brown, about 15 minutes. Stir the nuts halfway through baking to ensure an even color.
5. To get rid of the bitter skins, wrap the cooled hazelnuts in a clean kitchen towel or paper towel. Rub until most of the skins come off, but don’t worry if some remain.
6. Make the nut butter: When the caramel is completely cool, break it into small pieces and pulverize in a food processor. Try to get the caramel as fine as possible at this stage (it won’t get finer once you add the nuts).
7. Add the nuts and process until they have liquefied, about 5 minutes. Scrape down the sides of the bowl occasionally. Be patient; the nuts will go from a fine meal, to forming a ball around the blade, to nut butter. Add the cocoa, vanilla and salt and process until smooth.
8. Transfer the spread to an airtight container, and store in the refrigerator for1-2 months. For best results, stir the chocolate-hazelnut spread before using.