Life's a Stitch

Not your typical cake story, this one has solid history and there is an effort afoot to preserve its legacy. It has all the elements of a page turner: tragedy, hope, love, survival  and an eye to the future. 

This story starts with Alex Buckman, the president of Vancouver Child Survivors of the Holocaust. In a nutshell, after his parents were killed in concentration camps, he was raised by his aunt, who in a woman’s camp secretly wrote down her recipes from memory. This is not about a happy ending, as no Holocaust story is, but about hope and achieving a sense of purpose. 

One brief paragraph can’t tell this very moving, but complicated tale, so take a few minutes to read about it here. Better still, take 30 minutes to listen to CBC’s  radio documentary, an outcome of which is to inspire people to bake the cake yearly, on Remembrance Day.

The recipe:

The cake: 

This past spring, when I had professional prints made of the dog portrait I painted for my sister, there was a free pile outside the photo shop. “Thrifting” is another enjoyable non-lethal hunting behaviour for us right up there with mushrooming and geocaching. C views  everything through his “what can I do with this?” filter, as was the case with this Brilliant brand broken tripod from the junk pile in front of the photography store. 

Paired with a piece of hickory wood, C turned it, excuse the woodworking pun, into a side table to put between our new Norwegian chairs. Zoom in to see the Brilliant brand metal plate just under the tabletop.

Rescue mission #2. When we moved into our last house in 1998, we discovered an indoor planter filled with zebra plants and overgrown ladyfinger cacti. The previous owner had lived there since 1959, so the plants were potentially approaching their 40th birthdays. We carefully repotted them and they eventually made the move with us to White Rock.

I did my best to keep them alive during the renovation, but the winter months without heat took their toll. A few of the zebras escaped unscathed and last week I noticed a tiny patch of fresh green on the cactus! These are now almost 60 years old and I was determined to save them. C did a nice job repotting them in a garage sale planter and dollar store pots and he’s carefully spritzing them back to life.

Aside from fall’s foliage, it’s been an exceptionally colourful month here. I think I crave colour in preparation for the long Pacific Northwest season of foggy greeny greys.

C finished another piece of garden art.

Initially I thought it was responsible for this magnificent afternoon rainbow cast upon our rock wall. 

In fact, that spectrum of light is a fall phenomenon, like the changing colour of the leaves. As the afternoon sunlight angle changes, in October it hits the bevels of our bathroom mirror and produces this example of nature’s artwork.

Not the prettiest pav on my blog, it is the brightest I’ve posted. Never mind the crumbly sides, it was delicious.

Look at these edible mushroom we found last week, appropriately called Laccaria amethysteo-occidentalis, or the amethyst deceiver, as it changes colour quickly.

Our autumn sunsets are spectacular.

And the poppy seeds that hitched a ride in planters from our old house, have bloomed right in time for Remembrance Day.

Last week’s post was absent while we camped on the Oregon and Washington Coast, passing through places whose names conjure up tough times on the foggy, rocky sea: Dismal Nitch, Cape Disappointment, Heartbreak Trail, Deception Pass and a ray of hope at Never Give Up Road.

Geocaching at the 1906 wreck of the four masted Peter Iredale (Fort Stevens) was soggy:

But the mushrooming was fruitful:

Thats a King Bolete, more commonly known as a variety of Porcini. This week, here in BC, someone found one that weighed over six pounds! It was the size of a basketball.

What a great day – geocaching and mushrooming. It’s all about the thrill of the hunt for me, C is not a fan. He hates when I bring home mushrooms that get thrown out for lack of positive identification. I told him he’d hate it worse if he got sick on an unidentified fungus.

Camp cooking included chicken and cheese pupusas on the camp stove:

 And campfire pizza:

At another geocache it was my turn in a frying pan – the world’s largest cast iron skillet.

The last time we were there, Bryant was ten weeks old. We’re not waiting another 28 years to return and plans are in place for next year’s visit.

Time to give C some space for his creative retirement activity – garden art. Part of the fun is combing the beach for interesting wood and sifting through thrift at the local stores. This is a 65th birthday gift for his sister. The vase on the bottom can actually hold flowers:

Unfortunately his stash of unusual wood, stored tucked behind a board on the side of the house, was stolen during the finishing stages of the house.

Can’t forget treasures foraged from neighbourhood free piles combined with construction debris and dollar store buckets:

Not that I’m planning on starting another kitchen from scratch. Nope, I’ve had the good fortune to say I’ve been there done that. Twice. Each time is a learning experience and there are inevitably things you’d do differently. Maybe, if you’re planning a new kitchen you can learn from  my experience.

Most of the issues involve the appliances. I’d pay more attention to details next time. We had the opportunity to purchase a builder’s package at a substantial discount so we went for the step up to the JennAir line, Kitchen Aid’s fancy brand. Here are my issues, admittedly gold plated. 

1. Wall oven – the temperature can only be set in 25 degree increments. No such thing as baking at 365. Your choices are 350 or 375. Here, wall ovens only come in electric. I miss my gas oven, particularly the speed at which it preheats.
2. Cooktop – we thought we were upgrading in size by purchasing a 36” cooktop, which is gas. Only issue is that the controls are on the right, instead of in front, so the resulting six burners are on a surface the same size of a standard stove. 
3. Panasonic microwave – not the one we chose, but substituted when our original choice was discontinued. This one is quite attractive with infuriating controls and is clearly a case of form over function. It’s mainly knob driven and can mostly be set in increments of 10 seconds. The knob is turned until you reach your desired time unless use a programmed button. Pain in the neck.
4. Dishwasher – have again gone for the third rack on the top expressly for cutlery. Highly recommend this design. A little preplanning while loading lets you scoop up your forks, spoons or knives all at once when unloading. Have to laugh that we carefully planned the height of the wall oven so as not to be bending to lift heavy items in and out, but the bottom of tall tub dishwasher is nearly on the floor. Didn’t think about that.
5. The kitchen sink is under mounted and very deep. It’s also quite flat on the bottom requiring extra spraying of water to coax stuff down the drain.
6. Don’t know how it happened, nobody asked my preference, but that darn corner cabinet has a clumsy bifold door. Not that I would have spent the hundreds extra on a “magic corner,” but I don’t mind a regular door with a deep cupboard.
7. Could have probably done without the pendant lights over the island. I’ve never used them. They are much too bright and pot lights would have been as effective, easier to clean and less expensive. We’ll need to add a dimmer to make them work.
8. I’d skip the Shaker style cabinets, particularly the darker painted ones. The little rim, technically called the rail, requires constant cleaning/dusting. C says we had a choice of a 45 degree angle and we chose the 90. Was I at that meeting?

But bottom line, it’s a great kitchen cooking-wise and isn’t that what counts? And it’s probably one of the only aspects of this rebuild that came in on budget.

On the theme of do-overs, I’d change nothing on recently finished painting #2 from my workshop with Lian Yuan Zhen. 

People told me that in retirement I’d have so much to do, I’d wonder where the time went. So true. How did I ever fit a day of work into my schedule? 

Deep breath. One thing at a time. Fortunately mostly good these past two weeks.

The first good thing was the opportunity to participate in a three day workshop with Lian Quan Zhen – physician, architect, artist, vegetarian Buddhist, skilled teacher and in-class comedian.

Instead of the photo realistic style I’ve adopted, this involved giving up control of your paint by pouring, splattering and blowing the colours across the paper. And you only used the three primary colours. How scary is that? If you’re me….very.

Well I got up my nerve and orchids were the first of two subjects we learned.

The challenging aspect, these past two weeks, was the demise of my 2011 MacBook. It was the device of choice for my blogging activity. Bear with me while I resort to IPad posting.

Years ago we heard about a couple who planted a few apple trees in their front yard. After several years they had so many apples they had to enlist family and friends to help with their apple problem.

Something about that appealed to me. I wanted a fruit problem, too, so I convinced C to plant a three peach trees; visions of pies, preserves and chutney dancing through my head. The cost of soil preparation, trees and blossom drop prevention spray far exceeded what we would have spent on peaches for years to come. But the thought of homegrown freestone fruit was my siren song. Bottom line – no peaches. Not a single one.

Our new house, replete with three strips of plantable dirt, renewed the fruity song in my soul. I’ve opted for a blueberry problem. My neighbour says, sure you’re going to have a blueberry problem, it’ll be keeping out the birds and raccoons. Not to be deterred, Chuck and BIL Greg, humoured me with their hard work.

It started with home grown soil testing, they guys having overlooked the test kit on the shopping list.

Listening for the fizz.

The verdict? Neutral  soil requiring the addition of Organic material and acidified. Note to self: don’t mix the two concoctions together unless you want to clean up the eruption of a dirt volcano. They contained baking soda and vinegar, the ingredients for the lava of grade school science projects.

The finished product.

 This  year’s chutney project using store bought fruit, both blueberry and peach.