Sammy's Dot

Or, two photo essays depicting a wonderful day for two Richmond Hill squirrels.

Here, a black squirrel makes a delicious discovery.

Something prompts the black squirrel to look up from his delicious almond.

"Oh my!" says he, as his ears perk up.

"Is the coast clear?"

Indeed, the coast is clear! "I can't wait! What luck!"

"You realize that this is mine? All mine."

He sidles carefully over to the unexpected feast, afraid it will vanish as quickly as it appeared.

Sounds of nomming.

Defeated by its size, the black squirrel attempts to drag it away...

But woe for the black squirrel, no longer alone!

Munchy munch. "These seeds are boring," thinks the gray squirrel.

"What are those sounds of nomming I hear?"

"I must join in this nomming!"

The gray squirrel finds the unexpected feast.

"Amazing!"

"Mine! All mine!" The gray squirrel thinks, as he attempts to drag it away.

There are two things that I like to do when I don’t want to do schoolwork (well, three, if you count knitting, but two are more likely activities): read and cook.

I’ve been in the mood to cook recently.

Tonight’s dinner was, therefore, a chance to experiment. I joined the Daring Cooks too late to participate officially in the January challenge (though I’m really looking forward to the next one!), but it turned out to be something that I really wanted to try for myself, satay chicken.

To go with it, I made the “coco-vegetable rice” from Jay Weinstein’s The Ethical Gourmet. (I’ve made this before, but I really, really love it.) I’ve been making this recipe for a couple of years, and I think it was this that first suggested to me that “slaw” need not be synonymous with a soggy, stodgy mess of sad vegetables in too  much mayo, and that cabbage is in fact delicious. And since cabbage is one of the very few Ontario vegetables available in January, this was a happy discovery. (Even if it is served with rice and coconut, neither of which grew here last time I checked. But still. Cabbage! Local!) read more »

The January 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Lauren of Celiac Teen. Lauren chose Gluten-Free Graham Wafers and Nanaimo Bars as the challenge for the month. The sources she based her recipe on are 101 Cookbooks and www.nanaimo.ca.

***

I have to begin with a confession. I think this may cost me some of my Canadian cred – even more than the time I blithely said that the animal on our quarter is a moose.

I don’t particularly like Nanaimo bars.

I do love the idea of them: graham cracker crusts (with nuts and coconut, no less!) are yummy, custard is always good, and chocolate is chocolate and nothing else need be said. But put them all together, and for some reason we Canadians tend to produce something so sweet it makes my teeth ache.

I’ve made them twice before, the second time just this last December, while visiting R in Belfast; we brought them to a potluck dinner his co-workers put on, as they asked us to bring something Canadian. It took a good chunk of our last day before coming back to Toronto to track down the ingredients. We never did find graham crackers (though plain digestive biscuits turned out to be more or less indistinguishable), and had to go to five – FIVE! – grocery stores before we found unsalted butter. I was pretty pleased that we managed to make anything at all, given the under-equipped kitchen we had access to, but they turned out like ordinary Nanaimo bars – painfully sweet. I’m not sure R’s colleagues were impressed. (Probably a good thing we didn’t make poutine!) It convinced me that if I made Nanaimo bars again, I was going to do something different.

Fortunately, a few days later I signed up for the Daring Bakers, and the opportunity presented itself. read more »

Wow.

I really am surprised by this; given the clear nation-wide dissatisfaction with the decision to prorogue and Harper’s usual political acuity, I wouldn’t have expected quite such a blunt statement. And now I’m just waiting to hear Harper announce “L’état, c’est moi.”

“Prime Minister Stephen Harper is offering a new wrinkle on his reasons for suspending Parliament – the government can do more important work without MPs sitting in the Commons.”

In fact, it’s possibly true that the government can get more work done without the inconvenience of rowdy Opposition MPs demanding accountability. It’s just, you know, totally contrary to the democratic ideals that most Canadians hold. Parliaments exist to hinder the government in its quest to do whatever it pleases.

Although it’s an interesting new take on small government, I suppose, since the government does pay the MPs.

What Dawg said.

Perhaps it’s not right for me, as a non-Liberal voter, to criticize Ignatieff’s decision to try to get a sense of what Canadians want; after all, proposing a bold new policy direction didn’t work very well for Stephane Dion. However, as a Canadian citizen concerned by Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament for the second time, effectively killing the Foreign Affairs Committee’s investigation into the treatment of Afghan detainees, I want the leader of our Opposition to be leading, not trying to follow the disparate directions of hundreds of Canadians who are divided, regionally, ideologically, and culturally.

A palette: a palette of colours. An artist’s palette.

A palate: that which one cleanses between the courses of a meal.

Palette. Palate. Not. The. Same.

(Because the state of the world is depressing tonight. Can’t we say no to more greenfield development?)

Please hire back your copy editors.

Immediately after the capture, dozens of onlookers who had gathered, disappeared.

The animal has since been released in a conservation in the city’s east end, but no one knows where it came from.

(However, I too would like to know how a deer managed to get to Dundas and Chestnut. Definitely not where one would expect to see anybody but the squirrels and raccoons – and yet another reason why we need to advocate for wildlife corridors in the city. Wouldn’t it be nice if the deer could come and go without mobs of people gathering, or requiring a police “escort” outside of the city?)

Sincerely,
Tariqata

P.S. Still alive. Just busy.

The Toronto Star ran a fascinating article in their Insight section today (albeit one with a baffling sub-header): “From Motown to Hoetown“.

The gist of it: approximately half of Detroit is sitting empty. It’s a food desert in perhaps the bleakest sense of the term: there is not a single chain grocery store left within the city limits. Given the obvious economic depression of the city, I suspect that locally-owned grocers are few and far between; most residents don’t have many options besides convenience stores for food.

Really, the answer is obvious, and both entrepreneurs and local food activists are proposing to turn the empty property into productive farms. (The bafflement of the sub-heading is that the article only very obliquely, if at all, covers conflict between activists and entrepreneurs. One presumes that the entrepreneurs are interested in factory farms?)

I, not surprisingly, am on the side of turning the empty land into community garden-style farms:

His D-Town Farm spans two acres of city parkland on Detroit’s western edge, where little bungalows with rusted awnings still line wide streets and a faded ice cream truck does laps of the yellowing boulevard. The volunteer team running it sells its leafy greens and radishes to local restaurants and farmers markets. Next year, it plans to hire two permanent employees.

“We’re trying to create an economic model, to show how agriculture could contribute to the economic recovery of Detroit,” Malini says, pushing into the brush to reveal a plastic greenhouse where oyster mushrooms will soon grow.

That model doesn’t include agribusiness. Replacing General Motors with Cargill isn’t the answer, he says.

“We’re activists. We’re concerned with the health, vitality and well-being of the black community generally. This is one part of a larger picture. So any proposal that brings in the corporate sector and disempowers community is problematic for us,” says Yakini, who spearheaded the just-formed Detroit Food Policy Council. “We’re much more in favour of smaller scale community-operated projects where people themselves have a vested interest and profit from the sale of the produce.”

Right on. No reason the farms shouldn’t be profitable to the people who operate them – but the profits should stay in the community, and the people who are working the farm should have control over what they grow and where it goes. And it should be accessible to them. Seems to me that the benefits would be much more immediate and tangible, and there would be benefits like this:

A woman up the street started sending her foster kids to help, and a movement was born. Covington erected four white boards to show movies on Saturday nights. He brought in chairs for reading sessions. He started a backpack program and hosted a harvest dinner for 90 neighbours.

Last year, he bought his old teacher’s home and the derelict store next door for $1 from the city, and $4,000 in back taxes. He plans to refurbish it into a community centre.

Looks at least some of the people in Detroit have a fantastic idea for how to rebuild their communities and their city as a whole. The article talks about the idea of planning for shrinking cities in recognition that nothing lasts (or grows) forever, and notes that North America really has no tradition of that kind of planning. I hope that Detroit’s municipal government is willing to get behind this plan.

Except that, really, there is more that you could want: honey and bourbon.

When I saw the photos on Sassy Radish (some time ago), I knew it wouldn’t be long before I made it myself, though in actual fact I didn’t get around to it for about six weeks. I was waiting for the Ontario peaches to show up, and it feels like that took a while. (And now, I feel like I’m oversupplied; can’t complain about luscious, brightly flavoured, amaretto-kissed peach butter though!) read more »

Thunderstorms are much more appropriate.

We just need to work on the temperature now.