Thanksgiving in Seattle

Vivian and Stephen offered their Thanksgiving feast a week early so they could attend their sister-in-law's wedding on the east coast.  For us, one of the highlights was seeing Yuri again.

But first, the calm before the storm.  We had a light lunch, topped off with getting the first crack at the day's cheeses.  Steve knows how much I enjoy cheeses: the harder, the better; the softer, the better; the stronger, the better. 

This year's homemade pickles go well with the cheeses.  People would eat all the pickles Vivian was willing to put on the table.

Yuri is getting teeth very nicely, growing like a weed, and by now is likely ready to crawl.  We noticed how much stronger his back and torso were than in August, reminding us of how quickly children develop.

Neither man nor dog showed fear, just curiosity.

 

After all of the stimulation, it was time to recharge the batteries for the next round.

Yes . . . we can

The west-coast response to Uncle Mark's wonderful preserving this fall . . . Vivian and Stephen have been busy freezing and canning.  Here we see pickles, which everybody enjoys who comes to one of their meals.  Beans and various veggie broths, etc. make up the rest.

The large crock on the lower right is for making sauerkraut, one of Vivian's favourite treats.  We gave them our shredder (after throwing away two spoiled batches) and another crock.  But this special crock has a lid with a seal which lets the fermenting gases escape without introducing foreign bacteria (which is where my method went astray).

 The lovely shelves were made by me (Evan) in Vancouver in October 1975 from teak or cedar (?) crating some foreign students had abandoned in the basement where we were renting (UBC married housing).  We had just moved here, Janice was Very pregnant and we needed some more shelves for supplies for the coming baby (Aaron).  I made the shelves rather crudely but sanded them, and Janice varnished the shelves.  That afternoon, Aaron was born.

Late Fall Ramble

We had a hard frost the first week of November that withered most of the garden plants but left a number of unripened tomatoes.  Three of them were turning color so we put them in a brown paper bag with an apple.  The apple gives off ethylene gas which hastens ripening and worked well enough to give us a few end of season grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches and a tomato salad.  They weren't as good as vine ripened but still tasty and left us feeling a little smug to have cheated the cold a bit.

Once washed, we had a meal of fried green tomatoes in a cornmeal batter 

dotted with Louisiana Hot Sauce inspired by one of our favorite cookbooks,

White Trash Cooking.

I bought a pickling mixture at the grocery store and processed several pounds of green

tomatoes with it.  They got very mushy and tasted disgusting.  That is now known as the Mal-Pickle Experiment and became a component in our compost pile.

I did find a good recipe that made sweet bread and butter type pickled tomatoes

and put up several pints for later.

Different subject:   Cooks Illustrated, a cooking magazine Frank turned me on to years ago, came up with a bread making method that produces a magnificent crust, one that the "crust lady" in our house highly approves.  A dutch oven and it's lid is heated in the oven at 500 degrees for 20 minutes, then removed.  Quickly put a loaf on parchment paper into the dutch oven and cover with the lid, return to the oven reducing the temperature to 425 for 20 to 30 minutes.  Remove the lid and continue baking for another 20 minutes.  Remove the loaf and place it on a cookie rack to cool.

Remember those very hot Thai chili peppers (lower right) that we grew this year? 

I use them with the hottest parts, the seeds and inner membranes removed.

 I sent a large bag of them to Florida with Amy's folks to give to Dave Sylvester, who loves all things hot, as a thank you for the Tuscan tomato seeds he had given us .  Gordy said Dave was very pleased and proceed to sit down with a martini and eat every pepper one after another popping them in his mouth like M & Ms!  Wow!

Remembering Dad--November 30th

[Photo by Janice and processed by Amy]

Mother's Easter feast of 2008 is worth remembering.  This Easter Sunday photo brings together things Dad dearly loved:  family, faith and food.   

Dad, we miss you, especially today.
Love from us all

 

The Hills' Annual Visit

I have enjoyed the posts that you all have blogged in the past few months.  It's especially nice to see Yuri getting a little bigger day by day.  My last entry here was back in August so there's a little catching up to do.

Amy's folks, Gordy and Pris, and Uncle David and Aunt Beverly made their annual trek up to the North Fork for the 14th year in a row, tied to the striped bass migration heading south.  After a weekend here they fished off Nantucket for five days then came back down for two weeks of fishing here.  The weather was very windy with some rain, but when it was good enough to go out, the fish were there.

Most of these photos were taken by David and Beverly

Lunch with Grandma Kreider's Tomato Soup

Gordy and I replacing corroded rail joints

      

                             

Amy and Uncle Dave and Aunt Bev   

                               

                       

The traditional all red lobster dinner

Gordy and Dave spend a day or two every visit fishing with Peter Minnick just off the Montauk Point Light.  Peter is deaf but can understand everything that is said if he can see you speak, and he speaks nearly as well as any hearing person.  He's been a teacher at a school for the deaf for many years.  When  Peter is fishing with his back to Gordy, Gordy signals him by tapping the deck... one tap, fish to the left, two taps fish to the right.  

Gordy and Peter

They stay overnight in the house Peter has lived in since he was a boy.  It was built in the mid 1700s,  the beams are exposed again and beautiful.  Two years ago the house was raised and a basement was built underneath it.  As a child Peter's bedroom was the third floor of the windmill.

One of David's delicious stripers.  

I made fish stock from the four pound

head of this one.

Visiting Yuri

On Monday, October 18th, Janice and I made a one-day visit to Seattle to see Yuri and everybody else interested in seeing Yuri.  He has two teeth which are just visible when he smiles, which is often.  Turning over is no problem, nor is scooting if he has something he can use for pushing off with his legs.  He likes to be held looking outward rather than over a shoulder, which suggests a real interest in observing the action.  Alyssa was at work all day and Bill had an appointment so Paul, Kay and we got him to ourselves for a bit.  With all the activity, getting him to take a nap was out of the question.

I like this shot because it shows both Janice and Yuri are responding to the same person in the same way, even if he does not understand what is being said.  You cannot train a child to respond like this!

Quite of bit of time centers on food, partly because he is growing so well.

Yuri singing.

New pocket camera for daily activities

I finally got a small pocket camera (Canon S95) which I try to have in my pocket before leaving the house.  I have wanted to carry something light for years but . . . .  I took the plunge a week ago Friday and am enjoying using it casually.  This is the first picture I took, something quiet, our (unusually clean) dining room table at night.  Our furniture was designed for a rather more grand home, so we cannot center the table with the ceiling lamp I made (close enough, eh?)

Another evening, the dining room table set for Sunday breakfast, my booklet of prayers and readings for Canadian Thanksgiving is ready to be reviewed during breakfast (I designed and was in charge of the service).

One of my dreams was to have a pocket camera with me whenever I golf.  Not all moments have that certain magic, believe me, but some of our early morning fog scenes can be beautiful.  Finding errant white golf balls in this heavy dew can be difficult.

This is the second fairway at the University Golf Course (which, strangely enough, is neither owned nor operated by the University).  It is difficult to see from the tee box, but the mist rising on the left is coming from a pond, the lowest point on the course.  Long ago, I lost track of the number of balls I have contributed to this stupid pond, sadly, some were on my second shot.  Because of its length, this par 4 is the hardest hole on the course.

I'm into food, particularly when prepared by someone else.  This shows my sandwich last Sunday noon at a small restaurant near church.  We were with three church friends.  The sandwich was so large that I saved half of it for golf on Monday.  Janice, being far more astute on such matters, wisely selected a salad.

We remodeled  the kitchen about 18 (?) years ago.  These south-facing windows give us pleasure every single day we are in Vancouver.  The faucet looks innocent enough, but it required three trips to the store before I could figure out how to install it.  The first time, I inserted an internal washer backwards and nobody could extract the plug, so I had to get a second new faucet.  Being German made, it carried a lifetime guarantee, which the store ever so kindly honoured, even when I had made the mistake.  Three cheers for Groehe!

My favourite photography teacher advised me to get some of my things printed and hang them, so that I would be forced to face my work daily (rather than fleetingly on a screen) and determine what needs to be improved and what seems to have lasting value.  Being lazy, I just prop them up against the wall.  Seems to work, and Janice thankfully decided decades ago that one does not stay married by nagging.

This is the saddest picture I hope I will be taking for some time to come.  These three sorry specimens represent our Entire Apple Crop this year--two tree's worth.  In the good ol' days, we used to freeze enough applesauce to satisfy a family of four for two meals weekly, plus have apples daily for four packed lunches for perhaps three months.  This year, even the sole large apple was hopelessly tart, but we decided to pick it before the squirrels or blue jays started to feast on it. 

Vancouver Garden in the Fall

The color scheme in the Vancouver garden is now soft shades of pink and lavender. It's always a surprise to see the delicate Colchicum (sometimes called fall crocus) emerge, leafless, out of the soil. Four days later, its flowers are wide open. The small size of the plant can be imagined by comparing it to the greenery of the creeping thyme groundcover.


It's Michaelmas daisy time! These particular plants are 5 feet tall, but I have shorter ones too.
Blowing in the breezes in the back yard are the Japanese anemones, with a Rose of Sharon to the left of the photo. After I saw a blooming Rose of Sharon in front of Mark and Amy's Brooklyn home one summer many years ago, I had to buy one. This led to buying two more.

Now to the edibles...the raccoons are usually the lucky ones to eat the grapes though. The vine looks lush because the vine trimmer (JEK) is ignoring the branches crawling in the eaves, getting entangled in the camellia bush, and invading the neighbor's property. An advantage of not trimming is that it keeps the deck and SW corner of the house cool.
You're lucky that I'm including only one zucchini blossom.

This year for the first time, I have several delicata squash plants. I even got a non-squash eater to eat this.

The tomato patch is limited to 6 cherry tomato plants, growing right up against the south side of the house under the over-hang to try to avoid the blight which arrives with the damper weather. This plot is no rival for Mark and Amy's, and the irrigation system is a far cry from theirs.

And now for a true-life photo, the kind you wouldn't see in a gardening magazine. Pots of basil, a geranium that doesn't want to flower, two pots of Swiss chard that I plan to nestle up to the house when the tomatoes are finished to see if it will winter over, shallots in a pot, parsley and marjoram going to seed, sorrel that planted itself, a squash plant with a total of one fruit, and a few other miscellaneous plants.

Closing with the tallest hollyhock ever!