After whining all day yesterday about not being able to find my favourite brand of lemon tea, I picked up a grapefruit flavoured one today at the European Deli and Paul came home with one I have never seen before. Lemon is it's main ingredient. Just goes to show you, you whine loud enough and someone will make it a point to shut you up. As it turned out, it's a good thing we have all that lemon tea on hand. Both of us are feeling under the weather and hunkering down with a steaming cup of the citrusy brew. Figure skating and hockey over with, Sherlock Holmes is playing on the television while the last batch of cookies is cooling in the freezer. A busy day considering that drinking tea is all I had planned on doing all today. Here's hoping it's curative powers do the job by morning. Two weeks before Christmas is no time to call in sick.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Friday, December 9, 2011
I Love Lemon
It was cold today, colder than it's been in some time. I spent most of today driving around town dropping in on some old and new advertisers just to say hello. Did I mention it was cold? The only thing that kept me going was the thought of a lovely cup of lemon tea when I got home. Not just any lemon tea, oh no, not for me, I Love Lemon by Bigellow is what was going to be my just reward. I have tried many teas in my life and many of them are still in my kitchen cupboard. But the one tea that I most look forward to, especially on a cold winter day is I Love Lemon. The only problem was I was out; out of doors on a cold sun-less day and out of the one tea that could make it all better for body and soul.
You would think that picking up a new box of tea would be an easy task, so did I, at the beginning. After leaving the second store empty handed I was starting to have my doubts. Determined to stay positive, I stopped at store number three, and headed over to the designated tea/coffee section. If the shelves did not hold every imaginable flavour of tea, besides lemon that is, I would have been hard pressed to think of one. Everything from Green tea with ginger to Mellon Mango and Chai were present and accounted for. But where was the lemon? At this point in the day, I would have been happy to find any brand of lemon tea just to keep my taste buds from salivating and my toes from freezing. We are talking simple lemon tea here! Back in the day when there was only coffee or tea, Orange Pekoe and Lemon were the only choices one had in tea if one did not count Camomile, and Camomile never counted according to me.
But, there I was, cold, tired, cranky and in dire need of the only thing that would now do. I drove home, tore apart the tea cupboard, yes I have an entire half cupboard dedicated to tea, and just as I feared, came out empty handed. It would have been easy enough to brew a plain cup of tea and put a slice of lemon in it but you see, I Love Lemon is an herbal tea and the English or Irish Breakfast or the always tasty Earl Grey would not make a good substitute. Never one to give up easily, I remembered once drinking a delicious cup of hot water steeped with lemon peel. It was apparently a common southern Italian drink and lucky for me, easy enough to make. I peeled half a lemon, placed the zest in a mug, poured boiling water over the lot and immediately felt my self start to relax.
There is nothing like a hot drink on a cold winter day especially if the drink is a steaming cup of tea. If that tea is I Love Lemon, all is right with the world. The lemon and hot water substitute is a darn good stand-in, but just in case you need a more potent facsimile here's a recipe for home made Limoncello, with just enough time to make it in time for Christmas!
You would think that picking up a new box of tea would be an easy task, so did I, at the beginning. After leaving the second store empty handed I was starting to have my doubts. Determined to stay positive, I stopped at store number three, and headed over to the designated tea/coffee section. If the shelves did not hold every imaginable flavour of tea, besides lemon that is, I would have been hard pressed to think of one. Everything from Green tea with ginger to Mellon Mango and Chai were present and accounted for. But where was the lemon? At this point in the day, I would have been happy to find any brand of lemon tea just to keep my taste buds from salivating and my toes from freezing. We are talking simple lemon tea here! Back in the day when there was only coffee or tea, Orange Pekoe and Lemon were the only choices one had in tea if one did not count Camomile, and Camomile never counted according to me.
But, there I was, cold, tired, cranky and in dire need of the only thing that would now do. I drove home, tore apart the tea cupboard, yes I have an entire half cupboard dedicated to tea, and just as I feared, came out empty handed. It would have been easy enough to brew a plain cup of tea and put a slice of lemon in it but you see, I Love Lemon is an herbal tea and the English or Irish Breakfast or the always tasty Earl Grey would not make a good substitute. Never one to give up easily, I remembered once drinking a delicious cup of hot water steeped with lemon peel. It was apparently a common southern Italian drink and lucky for me, easy enough to make. I peeled half a lemon, placed the zest in a mug, poured boiling water over the lot and immediately felt my self start to relax.
There is nothing like a hot drink on a cold winter day especially if the drink is a steaming cup of tea. If that tea is I Love Lemon, all is right with the world. The lemon and hot water substitute is a darn good stand-in, but just in case you need a more potent facsimile here's a recipe for home made Limoncello, with just enough time to make it in time for Christmas!
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Can you say Sledz?
Since it's just a few days more than two weeks before Christmas, I have been finding myself thinking about Christmas Eve dinner more and more often. Having the piernik already made and frozen allows me to focus on the main part of the meal and all the special ingredients that need to be purchased. At our house, Christmas Eve is celebrated the traditionally Polish way. It is called Wigilia.
According to a very old custom, Wigilia dinner is served right after sun down and is usually comprised of 12 meatless dishes. We've always stuck to the meatless rule but have never served the 12 dishes. I guess you can consider this another non-traditional tradition, but we are full enough with the five or six we make every year to consider adding any more.
Every family has their favourites but we have been lucky enough to have my mother make, red barscz with uszka (beet root soup with little dried mushroom-filled dumplings), Greek fish (a white fish served with a carrot, celery and onion sauce), two kinds of home made pierogy, potato and cheese as well as sourkraut and mushroom ones, breaded shrimp and breaded calamari rings with sea food sauce( this has become a custom to appease my children who didn't like the barscz or fish), a fresh salad and usually a hot vegetable or two. Since all that cooking has been getting too difficult for my mom to do on her own, I have been getting more involved over the last several years. Last year, my daughter and I made the pierogy. They were not exactly up to my mother's par but I'm sure they will get better the more often we make them.
The one traditional dish that our family shares with most Eastern Europeans and Scandinavians is sledz.(shle-dge) or pickled herring. I didn't mention it till now because it's a dish we normally put on the table and soon after take back to the kitchen. It is one of those things we feel compelled to keep preparing even though I can't think of a single person at the table who eats it. I must admit, I did eat it as a child and even enjoyed it. As the years went on, it became less appealing and went the way of other foods I no longer eat such as smoked eel, headcheese, blood sausage and galareta (pig feet aspic).
There are countless stories of my husband Paul first joining the family for Christmas Eve and feeling obligated to at least try the dreaded stuff. I should have known he was a keeper after he tried more than once to acquire a taste for something that I think you have to grow up eating in order to appreciate. It is pickled in it's raw state, it is cold, it is salty, it is vinegary and fishy. There are many recipes available for trying to make this delicacy palpable but my earliest memories of sledz are of men eating it straight out of the jar and following it up with a shot of vodka. Even the promise of Vodka didn't make it worth trying the third time around. He is now an unabashed sledz hater and not afraid to say so. You, however, may be one of the lucky ones who will welcome a new reason to drink a shot of good Polish vodka after every bite. Here is a look at how others enjoy it.. Cheers!
According to a very old custom, Wigilia dinner is served right after sun down and is usually comprised of 12 meatless dishes. We've always stuck to the meatless rule but have never served the 12 dishes. I guess you can consider this another non-traditional tradition, but we are full enough with the five or six we make every year to consider adding any more.
Every family has their favourites but we have been lucky enough to have my mother make, red barscz with uszka (beet root soup with little dried mushroom-filled dumplings), Greek fish (a white fish served with a carrot, celery and onion sauce), two kinds of home made pierogy, potato and cheese as well as sourkraut and mushroom ones, breaded shrimp and breaded calamari rings with sea food sauce( this has become a custom to appease my children who didn't like the barscz or fish), a fresh salad and usually a hot vegetable or two. Since all that cooking has been getting too difficult for my mom to do on her own, I have been getting more involved over the last several years. Last year, my daughter and I made the pierogy. They were not exactly up to my mother's par but I'm sure they will get better the more often we make them.
The one traditional dish that our family shares with most Eastern Europeans and Scandinavians is sledz.(shle-dge) or pickled herring. I didn't mention it till now because it's a dish we normally put on the table and soon after take back to the kitchen. It is one of those things we feel compelled to keep preparing even though I can't think of a single person at the table who eats it. I must admit, I did eat it as a child and even enjoyed it. As the years went on, it became less appealing and went the way of other foods I no longer eat such as smoked eel, headcheese, blood sausage and galareta (pig feet aspic).
There are countless stories of my husband Paul first joining the family for Christmas Eve and feeling obligated to at least try the dreaded stuff. I should have known he was a keeper after he tried more than once to acquire a taste for something that I think you have to grow up eating in order to appreciate. It is pickled in it's raw state, it is cold, it is salty, it is vinegary and fishy. There are many recipes available for trying to make this delicacy palpable but my earliest memories of sledz are of men eating it straight out of the jar and following it up with a shot of vodka. Even the promise of Vodka didn't make it worth trying the third time around. He is now an unabashed sledz hater and not afraid to say so. You, however, may be one of the lucky ones who will welcome a new reason to drink a shot of good Polish vodka after every bite. Here is a look at how others enjoy it.. Cheers!
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Christmas Oranges
As the saying goes, we all sooner or later turn into out mothers and fathers. The way we laugh, what we feel compelled to laugh at, our love of music or sports, our dislike of rutabagas or our love of water. It is all mostly genetic. Once we get to that certain age, the age where we tend to notice things like this, we will often catch ourselves saying something or responding to something exactly as our mother or father would have. Often when we are young, we are aghast when something like that happens and vow to never let it happen again. But being the creatures of habit that we are, we will find ourselves being like our parents more often than we are not. There have been many times, that I stopped mid sentence almost, to swear the words that just came out of my mouth could have come from my mother's. That is also true when I'm cooking or shopping, cleaning or crying. My mother and I both have the misfortune of our nose turning red and our eyes almost disappearing in our faces when the tears start to flow.
I should not have been surprised then, when my daughter, who has never shown any particular enthusiasm or interest in being crafty, posted a picture of some Christmas decorations she crafted for her new apartment. The picture was not that of a store bought Santa, a preassembled Christmas tree or anything else that would have been convenient for a young girl, short on cash, and busy making her way in the big city. It was a picture of a pair of clementines studded with whole cloves the way I used to embellish them when she was young. I do not claim that embellishing clementines is a genetic trait, but it says a lot about how we feel about home and the things that we find comfort in when we need to make a home of our own.
Just out of curiosity, I will have to ask my own mother whether my grandmother studded oranges when she was young. I have a feeling I know what she'll say. Maybe that is the reason I always associated the smell of citrus with Christmas and still do to this very day.
I should not have been surprised then, when my daughter, who has never shown any particular enthusiasm or interest in being crafty, posted a picture of some Christmas decorations she crafted for her new apartment. The picture was not that of a store bought Santa, a preassembled Christmas tree or anything else that would have been convenient for a young girl, short on cash, and busy making her way in the big city. It was a picture of a pair of clementines studded with whole cloves the way I used to embellish them when she was young. I do not claim that embellishing clementines is a genetic trait, but it says a lot about how we feel about home and the things that we find comfort in when we need to make a home of our own.
Just out of curiosity, I will have to ask my own mother whether my grandmother studded oranges when she was young. I have a feeling I know what she'll say. Maybe that is the reason I always associated the smell of citrus with Christmas and still do to this very day.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
After a week or so of thinking that the next day would be the day that the Christmas tree would finally go up, we decided that there was no better day than today. We hauled up the box and assembled the evergreen in its intended spot. As usual, Paul spent the next hour trying to remember which lights we had used last year and why we hadn't thrown out the ones that did not work. Grumbling as he plugged in one string after another and finding only two that lit up, he threw the entire bunch back into a box and declared that he was going to buy some new ones once and for all. Deciding that I should probably pick up a few things at the grocery store while he was going out, we both headed for the door with a list in each of our pockets. This was 7pm.
We arrived back home just before 8, I with six grocery bags and Paul with several new strings of lights. Soon after I had started too put the groceries away I heard my husband declare that he needed another string or two. By now it was 8:30pm and my enthusiasm was leaning closer to the comfortable couch than another trip to the store. I asked Paul to spread out the lights while I opened one cardboard box after another. Ribbons and garland, glass bulbs and angels, feathered birds and hand drawn pictures affixed to cardboard by little hands twenty years ago, stared up at me from within.
I pulled out one object after another and placed the shiny loot on branch after branch. The fact that I had to stop several times to inspect each piece as I tried to remember when we had bought it or who had given it to us or how old the children were when they made it, might have had something to do with me finding Paul on the couch asleep.The next time I looked at the clock it was 10pm. I wound some ribbon around the tree and finished off some branches with little wired bows I had made several years ago. I stepped back, took a look and decided that the deed was done. Tomorrow I will tackle the mantle.
Here's a look at a professional decorating a tree. Don't let the weather in the video fool you, decorating Christmas trees is serious business, even in California. It doesn't look like she used any hand made ribbons or children's art work but you may get some ideas for when it's tree time at your house.
We arrived back home just before 8, I with six grocery bags and Paul with several new strings of lights. Soon after I had started too put the groceries away I heard my husband declare that he needed another string or two. By now it was 8:30pm and my enthusiasm was leaning closer to the comfortable couch than another trip to the store. I asked Paul to spread out the lights while I opened one cardboard box after another. Ribbons and garland, glass bulbs and angels, feathered birds and hand drawn pictures affixed to cardboard by little hands twenty years ago, stared up at me from within.
I pulled out one object after another and placed the shiny loot on branch after branch. The fact that I had to stop several times to inspect each piece as I tried to remember when we had bought it or who had given it to us or how old the children were when they made it, might have had something to do with me finding Paul on the couch asleep.The next time I looked at the clock it was 10pm. I wound some ribbon around the tree and finished off some branches with little wired bows I had made several years ago. I stepped back, took a look and decided that the deed was done. Tomorrow I will tackle the mantle.
Here's a look at a professional decorating a tree. Don't let the weather in the video fool you, decorating Christmas trees is serious business, even in California. It doesn't look like she used any hand made ribbons or children's art work but you may get some ideas for when it's tree time at your house.
Monday, December 5, 2011
So, I'm back from Toronto. Delivering bedroom furniture from one city to another, a four hour drive away, is not as effortless as it sounds, especially when it involves the actual planning, disassembling, packing, carting into the truck, unpacking, and hauling it up the stairs into it's new home. The effortless turns quickly into daunting when you're well into your fifth decade. At one point close to the end of the two day process, it suddenly occurred to me that I had done this before. Twice, as a matter of fact. I was birthing the daughter into her new life.
Looking out the window just a few minutes ago, I was relieved to see that the two day rain had finally turned to snow. The process, though not unexpected at this time of year, seemed prolonged and anguished, unable to settle on it's preferred state for any longer than an hour or two. The scene outside changed from a light drizzle to heavy rain to a mixture of rain and snow and back to rain within minutes at times. The birth of a new season, I thought. Profound thoughts or weather-headache induced delirium?. The latter is the most likely explanation. But, when things are a struggle, and enormous effort is needed to just get through the hour, most often our thoughts turn to all kinds of self-reflection. But the reality is this, all change is the birth of something new. Whether it be a new address, a new season or a new life. It is always messy.
Looking out the window just a few minutes ago, I was relieved to see that the two day rain had finally turned to snow. The process, though not unexpected at this time of year, seemed prolonged and anguished, unable to settle on it's preferred state for any longer than an hour or two. The scene outside changed from a light drizzle to heavy rain to a mixture of rain and snow and back to rain within minutes at times. The birth of a new season, I thought. Profound thoughts or weather-headache induced delirium?. The latter is the most likely explanation. But, when things are a struggle, and enormous effort is needed to just get through the hour, most often our thoughts turn to all kinds of self-reflection. But the reality is this, all change is the birth of something new. Whether it be a new address, a new season or a new life. It is always messy.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Screaming down a mountain side
So it seems that many, many people all around the world like to strap long, thin, slippery pieces of wood on to their boots and launch themselves from steep, snow covered hills and sometimes even treacherous mountain tops. So many people, in fact, like this winter time activity so much that it was given a name and a whole industry has developed around it. You can now participate in the sport of alpine skiing anywhere the presence of snow meets adequately hilly terrain. Considering the fact that I live in Canada, you would think that skiing is something I learned to do right after I mastered the skill of walking. That may be for many Canadians, especially the ones living in the northern reaches of our country but as for me, it took some 16 years before I had the pleasure of screaming down a mountain side.
When I say I screamed down a mountain side I mean it literally, sort of. I did plenty of screaming but the mountain part isn't exactly accurate. I happened to be on a "bunny hill", or what can also be described as an almost imperceptible dip in elevation. That should have been everyone's first clue as to the mismatch of my temperament to this particular sport. I also have to brag that I actually made it past the "bunny hill" and onto a tow rope and eventually the chairlift. But, since I'm being honest, I should also mention that the screaming part remained a constant part of the entire experience.
I was 16 then, and being the eternal optimist, I returned to the mountain and strapped on those dreaded planks of wood at least two or three more times. Unfortunately, not much changed with each experience. But, as I couldn't help but notice, many, many others managed to refrain from screaming and actually seemed to enjoy the experience. It wasn't till a year or two later that I discovered the sport of cross country skiing. It was more my speed but the snow and the slippery lumber were still part of the deal.
What can I say, it seems that I just wasn't meant to be a winter girl. Even though the sport of skiing did not become a part of who I am today,I can't help but laugh when I think back to those days and way I enjoyed sipping my hot cider as I watched the rest of the skiers from the comfort of the lodge.
Here are three looks at the sport of skiing. One sensible one and two fit for much more adventurous sorts.
When I say I screamed down a mountain side I mean it literally, sort of. I did plenty of screaming but the mountain part isn't exactly accurate. I happened to be on a "bunny hill", or what can also be described as an almost imperceptible dip in elevation. That should have been everyone's first clue as to the mismatch of my temperament to this particular sport. I also have to brag that I actually made it past the "bunny hill" and onto a tow rope and eventually the chairlift. But, since I'm being honest, I should also mention that the screaming part remained a constant part of the entire experience.
I was 16 then, and being the eternal optimist, I returned to the mountain and strapped on those dreaded planks of wood at least two or three more times. Unfortunately, not much changed with each experience. But, as I couldn't help but notice, many, many others managed to refrain from screaming and actually seemed to enjoy the experience. It wasn't till a year or two later that I discovered the sport of cross country skiing. It was more my speed but the snow and the slippery lumber were still part of the deal.
What can I say, it seems that I just wasn't meant to be a winter girl. Even though the sport of skiing did not become a part of who I am today,I can't help but laugh when I think back to those days and way I enjoyed sipping my hot cider as I watched the rest of the skiers from the comfort of the lodge.
Here are three looks at the sport of skiing. One sensible one and two fit for much more adventurous sorts.
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