Archive for September, 2011

September 29th, 2011

Yoga Bitch Review

 Yoga Bitch: One Woman’s Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment , by Suzanne Morrison is the antidote to all your I-can’t-believe-how-horrible-Eat, Pray, Love-was woes. Well, that was a mouthful. And if you’re the kind of yogi who wonders if having a mouthful of coconut vanilla milkshake negates all your yoganess, then you will likely laugh a lot while enjoying this yoga memoir.

A self-proclaimed atheist, Morrison finds herself still yearning and attracted to the “bell and whistles” found in religious rituals and ends up exploring that aspect of herself through yoga during a two-month yoga teacher training retreat in Bali. Beneath the humor is a real look at the shaky ground beneath teacher-student relationships and that delicate line between calling them “enlightened” and “hypocrite”. Caught between the ideology of transcendence and the $40 scented candles for sale at the local yoga studio, she intelligently explores territory that will be familiar to those of us who try to maintain a spiritual practice in a very material world.

CategoryBooks, Real Yoga, Yoga | CommentNo Comments »

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September 27th, 2011

The Art of Simple Food and Good Company

This post is part of A Return to Loveliness.

This past week my best friend and her French boyfriend were visiting from France. On Saturday we had such a delicious meal that I just have to share the details with you. All the food was pretty simple, using fresh ingredients, but it was a feast fit for kings—simply good food goes best with good company! The best part was that we each had our signature dish.

Appetizer: Amy’s Experiment

PC La Belle Rivière or Brie or Camembert

Thinly sliced apple

Chopped walnuts

Crusty bread

Preheat oven (we used a toaster oven) at 350F.  Slice bread, place on cookie sheet and top with apple slices, walnuts, and cheese wedges. Toast in oven on low rack until cheese is melted and the bread is slightly toasted (and crispy!).

We served this bread with a salad of baby romaine, spinach, chopped apples, walnuts, avocado, and honey-mustard dressing.

The bread was a real hit. I liked it so much I made again for lunch the next day and took a picture.

Entrée: Fabrice’s Beets and My “Perfectly Cooked” Trout with Rice

French Beets (can make in advance)

Boil or roast beets (we boiled due to time constraints), cool. Peel and chop beets. Add dressing below.

Approximate measurements (experiment to suit your own tastes)

1/4 cup olive oil 

1/8 cup apple cider vinegar

1 tbsp Dijon mustard

1 tbsp finely diced onion

(BTW, this dressing also tastes great with cooked green beans.)

My Perfect Trout

Apparently I have a talent for cooking fish! The French guests were impressed! So here’s my tips for cooking trout or salmon.

3 pieces trout (deboned, with skin).

Olive oil

Half a lemon, sliced

Fresh herbs (I had oregano)

Salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 375F. On cookie sheet, lay down aluminum foil. Place fish, skin-side down on foil. Built up edges of foil around fish to create a bowl for the juices. Drizzle olive oil over the fish. Add seasonings and herbs, top with lemon slices. Cook on middle rack for 15 – 20 minutes (10 mins if fish is thin). At the 15 minute point, remove from oven, check to see if it’s still raw under the lemon slices, if so, move lemon slices to another part of the fish, and cook for another 5 – 10 minutes. If you remember, check the fish in 5 minutes. The fish is ready when it gently flakes away from the fork and is no longer raw inside but still has some juices (it continues to cook a bit on its own). Serve immediately with rice and the beets. We simply had soy sauce with the rice.

The Dessert

After our bellies digested the meal, we had apple crisp and vanilla ice cream for dessert. My apple crisp was well-received too! That’s because I didn’t forget my crisp secret: double the crisp topping! It makes for a thicker, caramel-like topping.

I am sad to see my friends gone, but we have a delightful memory to share until we get to sit around a dinner table again (maybe next time it will be in France–oh, I can dream).

CategoryDessert, Fish, Food, Recipes, Salad, Seasonal Produce, Vegetables | Comment7 Comments »

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September 21st, 2011

Lake Side Plant Walk

Are these cranberries? I surely do hope so, I’ve been eyeballing them all summer
.

 

If these are cranberries, I’m guessing they’ll be ripe sometime in October? Please let me know.

Also need help identifying the following plants.

This beauty caught my eye because the light glinted off the leaves making it look like it was cast in bronze!

Now I know I’ve seen this plant in a book somewhere, but I can’t remember what it is.

 I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this plant before:

I feel like I should know what this is! I wonder, are the berries edible?

One more:

 

Of course it wasn’t all serious plant business–I also had fun jumping from rock to rock.

CategoryAutumn, Nova Scotia, Seasons, Uncategorized, Wild Plants, Wildflowers | Comment7 Comments »

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September 20th, 2011

Fall Enchantments

A Delightsome Life

Fall Equinox is near (Sept 23), so in honour of the changing season I’ve joined in with “A Return to Loveliness” celebrating the arrival of Autumn special edition by showing some of my favourite fall enchantments. What are yours?

-          Bright red berries on the holly bush and the mountain ash.

 

-          New perennial flower bed consisting of fall dividings (soapwort, Coreopsi, Shasta daisy, St. John’s Wort, brown-eyed susans, Jerusalem artichoke , phlox, spiderwort, sneezeweed, limelight, and 2 other things I don’t rememeber the names of:) I hope they survive and fill up the space into a beautitful cottage-style flower garden! The space was overgrown with wild roses, golden rod, grass etc. It took some time to get it ready. Most of the plants came from my mother-in-law’s garden. The St. John’s Wort come from another  part of the yard where a seed the “mother bush” must have been dropped off. The soapwort came from one of the gardener’s in the gardening club (plant exchange). I can’t wait to see what they look like in bloom. Total cost for this flower bed (not including my labour): $4!

 -          Sort of sweater weather: had two on this morning. It’s 4pm now and warm!

-          Noticing the changing leaves.

-          Looking ahead to more time indoors by reading homemaking, cooking, decorating blogs:

A Cultivated Nest, Coffee, Tea, Books, and Me, The French Country Cottage, How Sweet It Is, The Charm of Home, A Delighsome Life

-          Prepping my fall and winter reading pile–it’s a big one!

-          Not too hot to bake (hmmmm, apple crisp).

-          Pumpkins and apples everywhere!

-          The smell and feel of crisp, cool air in the morning.

-          The rays if the rising sun shining through the dew-dampened woods.

-          No more mowing the lawn–I hope.

-         Tall, golden grasses blowning in the wind.

 

-         Even the local fungi is enjoying fall colours!

As you can see, I’ve downloaded a new photo editor to play with!

Hope you enjoy your last few days of summer.

 

CategoryAutumn, Gardening, Natural Contemplation, Seasonal Living, Seasons, Uncategorized | Comment9 Comments »

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September 16th, 2011

End Of Summer Updates and My Favorite Non-fiction/Spiritual Books Video

Some near end of summer updates:

- The potatoes I planted turned out awesome! And they were an afterthought.

- The freezer is stocked with blueberries. I still have a few to pick later today, but they’re pretty much over. I will miss my blueberry picking friends. Say hello to them:

- I’ve got herbs drying.

- Eating lots of tomatoes from the garden . . . not such much kale, it keeps getting eaten by some creature. Also, some animal has decided that my garden makes for a nice litterbox. Today I saw an animal run out of the garden, but I didn’t have my glasses on so I couldn’t tell if it was a rather large orange cat (although the poop is not buried) or a fox. I can’t identify the poop. I’ll have to study to the poop display next time I go to the natural history musesum.

- I’ve been busy prepping another much overgrown flower bed to make room for the best kind of plants–FREE ones! That will be another post.

- Eating lots of wild blackberries that make their home in my hedges.

- I’ve been fooling around with videos and having too much fun. Here’s my second video (I feel like such a nerd):

CategoryUncategorized, Video | Comment5 Comments »

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September 14th, 2011

Spontaneous Flow Yoga: My First Video

I can’t believe I actually posted this on Youtube. It’s my first video so the quality is not very good, but I had fun fooling around. I’m a bit hesitant to post a video of myself, especially doing yoga, but it is a silly fear that is rooted in poor body image (where’s my yoga butt? Oh, I don’t have one, I have my mother’s flat butt!). So this is big step for me to put this out there. I didn’t even edit out the part where I fall because real yogis fall sometimes, even if they’ve been doing it for 14 years.

So enjoy this quick glimpse in to my personal yoga practice.

CategoryReal Yoga, Uncategorized, Yoga, Yoga Video | Comment4 Comments »

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September 8th, 2011

Hidden Beauties: Secret Waterfall and Bluebead Lilies

Sometimes a short walk will lead you to a hidden beauty, known only to the lucky few who have a home away from home behind the iron gates. I am not one of those “lucky” few, but with an outdated guidebook I was able find their secret! What I’m not showing you is the house that is built nearby (obviously fairly new), but if you look closely in the first picture you can see the small tip of a deck built on top of a flat rock overlooking the falls. I pretended it didn’t exist.

I plan to go back in the fall to explore more of the falls and follow the river. When I finally get a bike, I think this will be one of my destination goals.

Do faeries exist? I present Exhibit A, attesting to the fact that they are indeed, real. Turns out the Victorians where correct in their assumption that faeries sometimes live near waterfalls . . . or maybe it’s just evidence that dragonflies peruse the area.

Bluebead Lily

Bluebead Lily is a native, perennial plant commonly found on Nova Scotia’s shaded forest floor.  The berries are inedible and mildly toxic. The leaves are edible, but only when very young (a few inches tall).  I have never tried one so I can’t say anything about the taste. However, since they are slow to spread and sensitive to grazing white-tailed deer, it is perhaps best to leave this plant alone. The plant reproduces by seed or rhizomes. “Flowering in May and June, it takes over a dozen years for a clone to establish and produce its first flower, 2 years of which are dedicated solely to germination. The rhizome starts to mold after approximatively 15 years, but a colony often covers several hundred m². Few specimens establish new colonies.” (source) Needless to say, the plant is not easily transplanted, but you shouldn’t be stealing wild plants anyway, it’s not nice to mother nature and it’s illegal.

CategoryNatural Contemplation, Nova Scotia, Uncategorized, Wildflowers | Comment6 Comments »

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September 5th, 2011

Down at the Farm: Grass-Fed and Free Range

This weekend we drove down to visit the farm that we sometimes get our meat from. It’s no surprise that it is cheaper to buy their grass-fed meat directly off their property as opposed to getting it at organic grocery stores. It’s about a 20 minute drive from our house. Here are some of the critters we visited:

pigs
IMG_3120
goat in dish

emu
elk
deer

chicory
boar3
boar 4

boar

The wild boar were the most entertaining. They followed you (from the safety of their very, very large pen) and squealed, but if you made a sudden movement they spooked and ran away, only to turn around and come back to inspect you. I definitely wouldn’t want to hear one coming after me in the woods–I’ve seen too many kingdom movies where important characters get attacked by wild boar and die. There are lots of exotic animals at the farm, including emus, which make the freakiest sound I’ve ever heard come from an animal. It sounded like something you’d hear in Jurassic Park. I wouldn’t want to be chased by an emu either. We also got to look at the elk and deer from a distance. Of course, there are the normal farm animals: pigs, goats, lamb, cows, horses, chickens, ducks ansd geese.

It was a fun way to shop!

While there I also got a shot of Chicory and Birds-Foot Trefoil. Both are grown as forage crops for livestock so it’s not surprising to find them in this setting.

 Chicory is a perennial plant that is also grown for salad leaves, chicons, and roots, which can be made into a subpar coffee substitute. A native of Europe, Chicory has become naturalized in North America.

And Birdsfoot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus):

 

Bird’s-foot Trefoil  (also known as Birdfoot Deervetch) are grown forage plants, as well as for pasture, hay and silage in agriculture. It is not native to North America and is considered an invasive species in some regions.

CategoryFarm, Food, Grass-Fed Meat, Local Food, Wildflowers | Comment3 Comments »

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September 2nd, 2011

Just Me and My Walking Stick

I love packing my bag and grabbing my walking stick on the way out the door to my special place a short three minute drive away (I need a bike) to the lake. As I pull in I pray that there are no other cars, and often there are not. The other day there were three cars park in the boat launching part. But the park is large so I set off down the trail with high hopes that I wouldn’t run into anyone. After I walked through a few spider webs, I took it as a good sign that the other visitors were not fellow hikers, but canoers who could be anywhere on this great lake (and not likely to be at “my spot”).

A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

- Walden, Henry David Thoreau

On the way to my spot I had the good fortune of seeing two bald eagles leave their roost as I rounded the corner. I watched them fly majestically in circles before moving on. Of course I had forgotten my binoculars and camera. On the way to my spot I did see some blue canoes pulled up on another shore far off in the distance, but when I finally got to my spot, they remained hidden.  Perfect. I come by myself because others get bored or need to talk. Although I sometimes wish I had a wise old dog at my side.

There I remained, swam for a bit, but lay mostly idle, just taking it all in. I like to close my eyes, withdrawing the senses, for a few moments of time, and then when I open my eyes again everything seems richer, more saturated—brand-spanking new.

Consider what the perpetual admonition of Nature to us is, the world is new, untried. Do not believe in the past. I give you the universe new and unhandled every hour. You think in your idle hours that there is literature, history, science behind you so accumulated as to exhaust thought and prescribe your own future. In your sane hour you shall see that not a line has yet been written; that for all the poetry that is in the world your first sensation on entering a wood or standing on the shore of a lake has not been chauted yet. It remains for you, so does all thought, all object, all life remain unwritten still.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I come out to these truly quiet places (no traffic sounds) I find stillness happens quite naturally and effortlessly. I don’t even realize it is happening. Too bad I can’t say the same for when I intentionally sit on my cushion at home.

To get back I walked the loop and looked at a variety of bright and interesting fungi, from neon yellow and red, to black and white. They looked like colourful worms standing up in choirs. I’ve also committed to memory images of a few berry producing plants and shrubs that I will someday find out what they are. By not having my camera with me, I also missed out on an opportunity to catch Indian Pipe still in bloom. There are so many wonders, and you don’t have to travel far to see them.

When I got back to the car, two men were pulling out a row boat, but the original three cars were gone! Well then, who did those canoes belong, too? Tis is a mystery!

CategoryMeditation, Natural Contemplation, Quotes, Solitude, Trails | Comment3 Comments »

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September 1st, 2011

Walking the Hedge

I’m a bit fascinated with hedges. So much so that I even have a few hedge witch books on my bookshelf (1, 2, 3)–purely for research purposes . . . or is it! I even started to write a fantasy novel where the hedge plays a major role in the plot (still working on it—don’t expect it anytime soon), but I’m no hedge monkey, although some of them make pretty music.

Hedges are a diverse habitat for many woodland species; sadly, hedges are sometimes the only environment left for these species, which is why there is a movement in Britain to protect them. Natural hedges are formed from wind-dispersed seeds and the seeds in bird droppings. There are generally shrubs and trees, too. Overtime, these plants grow thick; get interspersed with vines, brambles, and wildflowers. This ecosystem provides food, shelter, nesting and denning sites for a variety of wildlife. Acting as corridors, they also offer safe passage for wildlife (or perhaps even elves and faeries!) In folklore, the hedgerow was one of the boundaries between the human world and the spirit world.

For those who find themselves of the human persuasion, hedges muffle sound, make good wind breaks, and provide privacy,  foraging opportunities, as well as being pretty to look at. I personally enjoy watching the birds and bees fly about.

I spend a lot of “garden time” (similar to “me time”) exploring the hedge. The former owners mowed the lawn right to the edge of the woods. We’re too lazy for that, and so a hedge has begun to grow in its place. I’m learning about the plants growing there, and how to maintain and help the hedge develop. For example, I have some Mountain Ashes—a protective, magical tree—that stand in the back. In these areas I would like to clean up the hedge a bit, put in a stone path up to the trees and a little sitting area so I can spend time with them and not worry about ticks and thorns. I would plant a variety of native woodland species in the surrounding area. For my hedges in general, I would also like to plant more native shrubs and trees to improve upon the diversity in a few different spots—the rest I will let develop naturally. If the native plants have food or medicinal uses as well, all the better.

Just a few of the plants growing in my hedges:

Northern Wild Raisin

Mountain Ash

Golden Rod

Evening Primrose

Wild Rose

Yarrow

Asters

Old apple trees

Brambles (blackberries and raspberries)

For more information, see my resources:

http://www.ofnc.ca/fletcher/howto/hthedge_e.php

http://www.hedgerowharvest.org.uk/

http://www.opalexplorenature.org/HedgesFactandFolklore

http://www.opalexplorenature.org/sites/default/files/7/file/Top-10-hedge-tips.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge

CategoryFolklore, Gardening, Wildflowers, Wildlife | Comment2 Comments »

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