Alberta Tar Sands Take Note! Mushrooms: the Ultimate Recyclers

"6 Ways that Mushrooms can Save the World"- Paul Stamets on the wonder of mycelium.

Apple Oatmeal Recipe for a Too Early Fall

The first frost here in the great North was a frost to be reckoned with. Nothing like -5 C to clobber most of the garden leaves to a drippy, translucent mess. Not to mention how it left most tomatoes and squash that I was optimistic enough to leave on the vine. But, focussing on the positive, one has to turn to the carrots and apple- they really are divine after such a frost lays out their more tender garden compatriots. This is their time to shine.

Our grey, cold weather is enough to make me start making oatmeal again. If you're not a fan, try it one more time adding shredded apples and (a wee bit o') cream- and you may just be hooked (and healthier for it!).

Now that my black pot has been moved from the needs-to-be-redesigned- solar cooker, it has become my oatmeal pot. For something worth getting up in the morning, find yourself a pot and put in it:

1 Cup Oatmeal (I prefer regular, but use instant if you have it)
2 Cups Water
pinch of salt
splash of cinnamon (or 3 or 6)

Heat this up to boiling then turn to low for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. While you wait, shred an apple.

Add the shredded apple to the pot when oatmeal has thickened. Warm for another 5 minutes. Try experimenting, adding almonds or raisins as you prefer.

Sweeten with brown sugar, or maple syrup. I mix in a splash of cream to make it the kind of porridge you get for $9 a bowl at Vancouver hotel restaurants.

Happy warming, folks. The season for furnaces has begun.

Meeting Cora's Bees

Cora Suits Up

To watch the bees in action, check out this video of Cora opening the hive.


Quick quiz: What do you do when something black and yellow buzzes by your head? If you’re with my neighbour, Cora McLachlan, you better not swat at it- McLachlan is a beekeeper and keeps four hives on a Camrose area farm.  Her hives face a field of swaying gold grain heads. It is a short commute to work for her busy bees.

Last month I had the opportunity to watch thousands of her honeybees. Standing in their flight path from their hive to the field was surreal; the bees, like a lazy house cat, gave me no notice. “Things to do and flowers to see,” they buzzed.

Their homes are innocuous, simple wooden boxes stacked two to five high. Each one houses an average of 60,000 bees. Their door is a narrow, horizontal entrance at the base of the stack.

The hives on the left are healthy.

This year, only two of McLachlan’s colonies are strong. One weak hive was over exposed to winter gusts and the bees starved to death, huddled together at the base of the hive, too cold to venture to the food in the box above. The other colony has mites. These tiny parasitic creatures are wreaking havoc on Canadian bee colonies and in some areas are threatening the beekeeping industry. McLachlan doesn’t like medicating, but this year she must do it or face an extinguished colony in the spring. Prevention is her main interest in combating the mites and she is experimenting with a variety of methods.

Most honeybee colonies in Alberta travel from New Zealand in a capped tube, narrow in diameter and as long as a small car is wide. Eight to ten thousand bees are in this tube; there is one queen. This lucky lady will spend her life laying eggs in cells and secreting a pheromone that ensures all other females remain sterile. In the larger cells she lays drones (the male, minor characters in our story). The virgin queen will mate once in her life, mating with multiple drones. After the festivities, the lucky guys romantically, literally, drop dead.

From the smaller cells, females will hatch. As a beekeeper, you hope that most of the eggs laid are females because it’s the ladies who do all the work. In fact, too many guys can seriously weaken your colony by eating food the females spend their life collecting. In their short life span of about 6 months, the females will cycle through most roles in the hive. The queen must be cared (she will outlive her compatriots ten times!). Then there are the drones to run out and keep from the hive, the combs to build, the colony to defend, the collection of pollen and nectar from the field, and the honey to make. Most of their life will be spent in the fields.  

I'm feeling a little nervous.

To peek in the hive, I suited up like a real bee keeper- white coveralls smelled deliciously sweet, elasticized elbow-high gloves and a safari hat surrounded by netting that was tied securely around my collar. McLachlan suited up as well. She has kept bees for two years and has never been stung in that time. She’s careful, but the bees are also very docile when she opens their hive, thanks to the (legal) smoke she puffs into the top box a minute before entry.

Inside the boxes, plastic combs hang like file folders in a drawer. The combs fit tightly together to ease the bees’ work filling the cells with nectar (their carbs) and pollen (there protein). When the time is right, they cover it all with a preserving layer of wax. One box can hold 75 lbs of honey.  As one box is filled and capped, they work their way up. McLachlan’s September’s harvest was slim considering the number of stacked boxes, garnering her just over 100lbs of fresh, free flowing honey.

While McLachlan keeps her bees outside the city, an urban bee movement is gaining momentum.  Many cities including New York and Vancouver have overturned bylaws restricting beekeeping in the city limits. In Edmonton, Patti Milligan, aka Lola Canola, told the Edmonton Journal, “My feeling is, if we go the way of most cities that have had this discussion, the bylaw will be changed.”

The buzzing field.

My trip to McLachlan’s bees was a reminder to think a little differently about buzzing creatures.  Wasps and hornets are important predators in our gardens. Honeybees not only produce their sweetener, they and other pollinators are critical for apples, squash, strawberries and other plants to fruit.  The makings and mysteries of life are in the hands and feet of much smaller creatures than I.

Their gift is a miraculous one to our incessantly swatting race.

Solar Oven Funks my Potatoes

I must report a big huge failing grade on my solar oven design. A couple days ago I 'cooked' potatoes after Conrad from greenedmonton's left an excellent link to one of his posts on cooking with his solar oven.

Into the black pot went the new garden potatoes. Into the oven went the pot at about 9:30 am. To be doubly sure I'd catch the solar rays, I tilted the oven more significantly south and ensured the inside tin foil and reflectors were properly arranged.

At 6 pm I proudly removed the pot's lid to discover tepid potatoes that looked more ready for the still than my dinner plate. The solar oven seemed to have advanced the potatoes' fermentation process; brown spots and sour smell have dashed my high hopes for this experiment with solar.

I'm afraid I need to start over with my design. Perhaps after some success next year I'll be able to report what was wrong with our garage-junk set up... but until then, if you've any wisdom, I'd love to hear it!

Got Beets? Boil 'em, chop 'em, fry 'em up.

Beet season in our house stretches through the summer into fall thanks to succession plantings from April to July. Before now, I'd always peeled beets because that's what I did to turnips and yams. 

My friend Louise set me straight, "You peel them? No, no, no, honey, just boil them and the skin rolls off."  

Always happy to cut out a step, I boiled a cylinder beet and- holy moly!- the skin just peeled off. The critical thing to remember when boiling beets to eat is: Cut the greens off an inch or two above the beet root. Otherwise, you'll bleed your beet.

Once beets are cooked you can eat them plain or slathered with any combination of butter, oil, spices, herbs, salt. sugar. Or you can refrigerate them for up to a few days. Or you can freeze them up to ten months. Or, you can can them plain, or pickle them, or dye things with them... Beets are a versatile vegetable and one of the prettiest cooked! Check out this page for the humble beet's nutritional information.

Here are a couple of my favorite recipes:

Balsamic, Beet Wonder Salad

1. Dice cool, cooked beets

2. Toss beets in Balsamic vinegar and a little olive oil

3. Throw in some arugula or basil (or experiment with other salad leaves) and mix with beets and dressing.

4. Top with feta or Parmesan cheese.

5. Top this with roasted nuts (try salted sunflower or pine nut, walnuts fried with butter and brown sugar is incredible!)

6. Serve and make some more.

Vegetable Bake

1. Thinly slice a variety of veggies. In the above picture I've sliced yam, potato, beet and zucchini.

2. Layer the harder veggies (in this case the beet, yam and potato) at the bottom of an oil covered, deep dish frying pan. 

3. Put a little water over top (sprinkle it on to moisten), salt and pepper, then cover until veggies are soft.

4. Add another layer of softer veggies (like zucchini) and sausage. Add fresh herbs to this layer. Cover until veggies are soft.

5. Add cheese. A mix of mozza and a stronger cheese like parmesan or blue cheese is nice. 

6. Allow cheese to melt.

7. Sprinkle with paprika and serve bake after letting it cool slightly.

Lentils and Rice in the Solar Oven- Attempt #2

We've had cold, cloudy weather the last few weeks so when a sunny day was forecast, I got busy.

The night before afore mentioned sunny day, I prepared a Lentil, Rice, Black Bean, Vegetable soup and settled it in the solar oven. I wasn't too worried about food borne illness with a few veggies in tomato water.

At ten on the morning of the sunny day, I when to check the oven's temperature and realized that the morning sun had yet to shine on the spot I thought was sunny! I moved the oven directly south of our house where there's additional reflection off the cement walls. I also lined the oven with tin foil and added a wool blanket to the bottom to improve insulation. On this #2 try cooking with  Coalfree (the oven), she got hotter than last try- creeping up to about 175 degrees F.

At six that night, Lily and I tried the soup. It was steaming,  piping hot. The peppers were cooked nicely, carrots were a touch crunchy. The beans (canned) were fine, however the Lentils were about 90% and the rice 75% cooked.

In review, I need to continue to improve insulation so Coalfree will hit the magical 200 degrees mark. I choose this number because it's equivalent to the low setting on a slow cooker. At this temp, I can convert any slow cooker recipe and not feel insecure about cooking meat (though I think this is my western, uber-bacteria conscious sensibilities! See my last post on solar cooking for food safe temperature links.)

My pot also needs more sun time. On cooking day, the oven had about 8 hours of sun (a thunder storm approached at about 6 pm and we wouldn't have had any more cooking time);  my slow cooker recipe book suggests that rice needs from 5 to 9 hours at 200 F where veggies will do with 2 to 4 hours.  Coalfree's current location should allow for this, as she'll catch the sun's rays as early as 7:30 am, giving supper a much better chance of being ready.

I'll keep you posted.

A Mouse Slayer Becomes Part of the Family

We moved into our house, built in 1913, six years ago. I didn't notice the mice families that made my home their home until the winter of our first year here. They decimated a box of Red River cereal that had fallen in a back cupboard.

This sad, sick mouse sat here in the kitchen for Madi's viewing pleasure.

Mice are curious creatures. They feature strongly in christmas carols (it was the night before christmas/and all through the house/not a creature was stirring/not even a mouse), poems (Of Mice and Men's title was a line taken from an 18th century ode to a mouse family who'd nest was tilled), and films(ahh, sweet Stuart Little). They are kinda cute for a rodent. You also have to respect the house mouse's resiliency. They can enter a space the diameter of a pencil and are always willing to try new foods.

Much of their resiliency is surely due to their capacity to breed. Five to 6 young are born 3 weeks after mating and they become sexually active from 6 to 10 weeks old. So, not theoretically, females could have 6 litters per year equalling 36 new mice. Half of them then go about breeding just like their mamas.  

Of course if I were looking for a house now, I'd notice the 'mouse' signs: the steel wool around entrances and jammed around plumbing, the baseboard joints with slightly curved exits, the black poison boxes tucked behind furniture. Controls in our home has also included traps but I can't do the sticky paper! Sometimes I feel that our mice have become super-evolved. They are complacent about peanut butter, and have worked out how to steal chocolate without setting off the traps. They are ambivilent to the poison (and I'm squeamish about putting it out).

But two weeks ago I snapped. On two separate nights I heard the familiar scratching of a soon-to-be mama mouse tearing off the insulation from the ceiling tiles to use for her nest. The thought of more babies made be set aside my peevishness about cleaning litter boxes, cat hair on my clothes, dead mice at my door and itchy excema... I went out and got me a mouse slayer.  

What's worse? Dead dried mice in my walls or dead mice as presents on my bed side. Its a draw. 

Dubbed Biscuit by the three year old in the house, this mouse slayer hangs out in the basement's joists- choice mouse highways. In fact, one morning last week we awoke to find ceiling tiles on the floor. He'd fell from the roof in his hunt for choice morsels.

He's introduced my kids to the animal world's gladiator fight style.  This has brought up interesting questions for me. I want to shield my kids from the truth of what animals do to other animals. I also don't want to see it myself. Mice have brought the 'wild' into my house. And, like usual, I don't want to face the natural world unless its on my own terms. Like meat which I prefer to buy in a clean, non-animal-looking bundle on styrofoam, I want the benefits without the (necessary) 'gore' and 'mess' of the natural world.  I suppose this is one of the many perks of being at the top of the food chain: we can lie to ourselves then construct realities to confirm these stories. This cat, so languid and social, is teaching me a lot of about my own foibles regarding my role in the natural order of things.

Philosophical ramblings aside... our cat is an unrepentant mouse slayer. The mice are finally running scared.

Black pots are hard to find

After at least five trips to the second hand store in the past couple weeks, I have yet to find a used pot for my solar oven. I had read that its possible to paint a stainless steel one black, but I made one last ditch effort. This time I headed to Winners where they often have reduced, one-off pots.

Hurray! I may have broke the budget (I was hoping to score one for $5, but settled for paying $30), but I now have a black pot- as required. If you're on the hunt too, the pot must have a good fitting lid and should be sized properly for the meals you'll be cooking. Also, make sure its made of a relatively thin material; something thick like cast iron requires a lot more energy to heat the pot then heat your food.

Tomorrow is rumoured to be mostly sunny and I plan to put my fancy new pot to work.

Blanching- Terrible Word, Critical Step

Blanching. Its a really terrible word on the tongue and for a long time its one that's intimidated me.

So for wisdom, I sought out Louise Froese, a dairy and chicken farmer for decades who's got a firm handle on the various mysteries of food preservation.  Last week I visited her at her acerage to help her pick beans and learn about the secrets of blanching.

The main reason you would blanch veggies is to prepare them for freezing. The process helps to lock in the flavour, colour and texture of the food (so six months down the road you don't cook up a disappointingly mushy, bland stir fry!).


Basic Steps:

1. Pick or buy (bulk) fresh vegetables.

The large garden at the Froese's acerage

2.  Wash vegetable in warm water.

This variety is a bush bean called 'Royal Burgandy'. They grow purple, so are really easy to spot and pick, then they turn green when cooked.

3. Bring a large pot of salted water to boil on the stove. Add vegetables (if there is a wide variety of sizes, you'll want to seperate them into like sizes) and boil for the specified time. Over and under boiling will produce an inferior product. If your water doesn't return to a boil in a minute, then you are adding too many veggies. Also, some sources suggest that if you are blanching root crops like potatoes or  carrots, add them to the water when its cold and bring pot and veggies to a boil together, however I've yet to experiment with this.

4. If you have a pot suited with a basket, then this is a great blanching pot. I did not, so after the allotted time, I scooped the beans out quickly into a strainer next to the stove top.

5. The vegetables need to be cooled as soon as they are removed from the hot water. Place them first in a sink full of cold water. Then, transfer them to water with ice.  Cool the veggies for as long as you heated them.

I used a whole bag of ice from the freezer that I can simply refreeze for next time.

6. Spread out veggies to dry completely before freezing.

If you freeze the veggies before they are completely dry, you will have a block of iced veggies in your freezer. Then you will either have to thaw the entire bag's portion or stab yourself with a knife while trying to chip off chunks.

7. Place dry, blanched vegetables in freezer bags in your preferred portion size.

Sorry for the bad picture. But I've packed the beans four cups per bag, added a paper towel to soak up any liquid, and 'vaccuum packed' them (put a straw in the bag and as you zip, suck out the air).

The blanching process took me about two hours and garnered me about 24 cups (7 bags) worth of organic frozen beans.  It's not bad value for my time, though it doesn't take into account all the growing and picking time! The multiple steps is finicky and still a little intimidating to me, but crisp, nutrient rich stir fry- here I come!

For more on the science of blanching, check out this Free Culinary School podcast.

Chard? Kale? Squash? what the hell do you do with it?

It's harvest time and this is when I begin to worry about cooking and storing all the weird veggies I've planted/ buy at the markets. The thought of food going to waste because of my insecurity at cooking (and eating!) it makes me panic.

If you're like me and had no exposure to Kale or Quinoa or Swiss Chard as a child (or adult), check out Dani Spies videos. Thanks to Dani, I can slice up and fry up a piece of chard with confidence!