Going Domestic

comparing apples to oranges

Chris was over in Newfoundland (as far east in Canada as one can go!) recently, and came home with three jars of jam for me. One jar of blueberry, one of partridge berry, and one jar of bake apple. The only one I'd heard of before is blueberry. So I did a little investigating ...

It turns out that the partridge berry jam isn't made out of partridges, thank goodness! What is known as the partridge berry in Newfoundland is better known as lingonberry in Ikea :) I can only imagine how tasty that one will be! And when is an apple not an apple? When it's a bake apple, which I guess is actually a cloudberry. Confusing much?

what's in your bowl?

The first Williams-Sonoma in Calgary has only been open for a couple of months, and it's already near the top of the list of our favourite food-oriented shops. We haven't bought much, but it's fun to look and dream about espresso machines and copper omelette pans. A few visits ago, Chris became charmed by a set of stamped breakfast bowls. Each one has a different breakfast item stamped onto it's surface - I think that the "granola" one is my fave. Chris has been recently seen admiring the matching coffee mugs ...

Tiptoe

I'm putting this year's poor showing for tulips behind me and giving them another try. Madeline and I went off to Greengate one afternoon last week and I was delighted to see that I could purchase tulip bulbs individually! Whee! I bought three each of six different kinds.

Menton

Anna Jose

Creme Upstar

Blue Spectacle

Silverstream

World's Favourite

I'm entirely sure why the tulips I'd planted in the fall of 2003 didn't bloom this year, but my theory is that I needed to plant them a few inches deeper for this climate and shouldn't have been so quick to trim the foliage down. We'll see ...

Ceramic Anniversary

Chris and I celebrated our third anniversary a few days ago. The traditional gift for the third anniversary is actually something *leather* but we're breaking from tradition once again and re-tiling the backsplash in our kitchen. I think it will be awesome - currently we have tile there that the previous homeowners painted yellow. The problem isn't so much that the tile is yellow - it's just that the previous homeowners took no care at all while they painted it. It's lumpy and drippy. And they painted over the electrical switch cover plates. Again. I'm kind of torn between choosing faux tumbled stone tiles installed on the diagonal or some cool subway tiles. Either would be an incredible upgrade.

We dined at Jack's Grill for the first time ever for our anniversary dinner. I'm really glad we went there - they had a tasting menu featured as part of Dine Alberta. Both Chris and I had the tasting menu (something we've wanted to do for a long time!) and it was fabulous. We started with a beet salad, then pickeral in a sort of succotash (who knew that fava beans were so good?), next was veal sweetbreads in a tomato-based sauce, then wild boar loin in the very cranberry mustard that we have at home(!), and then dessert was a chocolate lava cake in a saskatoon berry coulis. It all was wonderful!

Pickle Barrel Polka

Refridgerator Dills
Originally uploaded by goingdomestic.

Well, the Refridgerator Dills were opened up a few days ago, after sitting in the dark fridge in pickling liquid for about seven days. Verdict? They're pretty good - dill-ish and crisp.

We made our second batch of pickles over the weekend, but for these ones we used a recipe that required processing. We're going to have to wait several weeks before sampling those - boo! Next, Chris want to pickle beets ...

time for an update

Chris and I recently switched our ISP from Telus to Shaw, and thus I lost about six months worth of archives. I figured out a little too late (ie. after I deleted the files I'd stored on the Telus server) that migrating them wouldn't have been too hard. Boo.  I still have the html files, so I might investigate uploading them to our new server space, but I didn't save copies of the photos. As a side note, one of the reasons why we switched ISPs was because the connection through Telus was rather sketchy - it was out of service for a few hours most days. Then three days after we get hooked up with Shaw, we lose our connection for four days! Ugh!  We called their help desk, and they said it would be seven days before they could send a tech out. We're having some doubts about whether it's a good idea to be switching to Shaw's digital phone service ...

We're now using the homemade vanilla that we started back in February. In all honesty, I kind of forgot about it - we kept it in a dark cupboard that doens't get much traffic. It looks quite a bit different now, and smells pretty terrific!

We *heart* Tomatoes

New in our garden: Valentine tomatoes. These ones are really tiny, and very tasty!  The little heart-shaped fellas were almost too cute to put in our salad!