Sunday, July 04, 2004
Farmers' market and pictures from home
Just a very quick post today - the weather here is horrible - outside temperature (according to the in-out thermo clock) is 10 degrees C (at 5pm), and its raining. In fact it has been raining all day, there is thunder rumbling around (yet again), the skies are grey, and we've finally figured out how to get the heating to work. There is a thermostat on the wall in the living area downstairs which you set to whatever temperature you want, and then flick a switch to 'auto'. The gas furnace then kicks in when the temp falls below your desired setting, and blows warm air up through vents on the floors. Its a bit strange having no radiators, but the warm air heats the house very quickly.
We went out to the farmers' market at Bearspaw this morning. I think that we half expected it not to be on as the weather was pretty nasty. Needless to say, however, the farmers are a hardy lot and they need to sell their produce to make a living, and I think that there were probably as many people buying stuff this week as there were last week when the weather was lovely. We bought a boneless half leg of lamb, and investigated the possibility of buying a whole or half lamb some time in the next couple of weeks. We have this notion that we will buy a small chest freezer and buy some lamb (and possibly some beef) directly from a farmer. We talked to a lady from Westward Ho Lamb, and she can organise a whole lamb (slaughtered, butchered, wrapped and brought down to the market) for about CAD$225 (at current exchange rates = £90). This seems like a pretty good deal, and you can choose to have boneless or bone in legs (left whole or cut in half), chops or racks of lamb, shoulder (bone in/boneless roasts, or cut up for stew), and then the 'trim' can be had as minced lamb or "traded 2:1 for breakfast sausage". (I assume that the latter means that you can trade 2lb of mince for 1lb of sausage (but I'm not terribly sure!).
Other purchases this morning included elk sausages (yes - you did read right - ELK!), asparagus, raspberries, cherries, blueberries (very lovely flavour!!), flowers, a big bag of peas in their pods, and two huge foccacia breads (CAD$7 for the two breads). The foccacias were as big as tea trays, so we cut them into three, wrapped them in Glad wrap and froze them. Shopping for vegetables is a different story from home. Even in the supermarkets here, it isn't easy to buy vegetables that aren't in season, or that aren't grown reasonably locally. For example, they don't seem to go in for the packaged trays of mini sweetcorn, or mange tout from Kenya. Currently, there are loads of small carrots with their tops on, piles of sweetcorn (still in their husks), small potatoes, peas and beans, and quite a bit of asparagus. Oh, and loads of tomatoes and lettuce (that I think are grown in British Columbia). It'll be interesting to see what happens in the winter - perhaps more stuff will be imported then, or perhaps we'll spend the dark months eating squashes and onions - who knows?
We then drove down to the Foothills Hospital so that J could find out where he is supposed to park on his first day. We circled the hospital grounds a couple of times and finally found lot number 8 - a large multi-story carpark solely for hospital staff. I think that J is a little apprehensive about starting work, as it will be a completely different experience to anything that he's done at home. Its strange to see the 'first day nerves' back again... for the first few years that he was a registrar, the first day nerves used to kick in every time the rotation changed, but as confidence grew, they didn't appear. He's not helped by the fact that the first month will be spent doing radiation oncology - no actual surgery... but the upside of this is that it is supposed to be a fairly light rotation, and Dr Temple reckons that it will give us some time to travel around in what they call "the summer driving season".... we'll keep you posted on how that turns out.
Right, almost time to go and put the lamb on, but before I do that, here are some more photographs. Given that the weather here today isn't exactly photogenic, I've decided to put on some photographs that Denise and Roy sent of our garden (supplemented by Denise and mum's gardening talents) at home..
So here goes:
and finally, the sunflowers that were only 7-8 inches tall when we left home...
We went out to the farmers' market at Bearspaw this morning. I think that we half expected it not to be on as the weather was pretty nasty. Needless to say, however, the farmers are a hardy lot and they need to sell their produce to make a living, and I think that there were probably as many people buying stuff this week as there were last week when the weather was lovely. We bought a boneless half leg of lamb, and investigated the possibility of buying a whole or half lamb some time in the next couple of weeks. We have this notion that we will buy a small chest freezer and buy some lamb (and possibly some beef) directly from a farmer. We talked to a lady from Westward Ho Lamb, and she can organise a whole lamb (slaughtered, butchered, wrapped and brought down to the market) for about CAD$225 (at current exchange rates = £90). This seems like a pretty good deal, and you can choose to have boneless or bone in legs (left whole or cut in half), chops or racks of lamb, shoulder (bone in/boneless roasts, or cut up for stew), and then the 'trim' can be had as minced lamb or "traded 2:1 for breakfast sausage". (I assume that the latter means that you can trade 2lb of mince for 1lb of sausage (but I'm not terribly sure!).
Other purchases this morning included elk sausages (yes - you did read right - ELK!), asparagus, raspberries, cherries, blueberries (very lovely flavour!!), flowers, a big bag of peas in their pods, and two huge foccacia breads (CAD$7 for the two breads). The foccacias were as big as tea trays, so we cut them into three, wrapped them in Glad wrap and froze them. Shopping for vegetables is a different story from home. Even in the supermarkets here, it isn't easy to buy vegetables that aren't in season, or that aren't grown reasonably locally. For example, they don't seem to go in for the packaged trays of mini sweetcorn, or mange tout from Kenya. Currently, there are loads of small carrots with their tops on, piles of sweetcorn (still in their husks), small potatoes, peas and beans, and quite a bit of asparagus. Oh, and loads of tomatoes and lettuce (that I think are grown in British Columbia). It'll be interesting to see what happens in the winter - perhaps more stuff will be imported then, or perhaps we'll spend the dark months eating squashes and onions - who knows?
We then drove down to the Foothills Hospital so that J could find out where he is supposed to park on his first day. We circled the hospital grounds a couple of times and finally found lot number 8 - a large multi-story carpark solely for hospital staff. I think that J is a little apprehensive about starting work, as it will be a completely different experience to anything that he's done at home. Its strange to see the 'first day nerves' back again... for the first few years that he was a registrar, the first day nerves used to kick in every time the rotation changed, but as confidence grew, they didn't appear. He's not helped by the fact that the first month will be spent doing radiation oncology - no actual surgery... but the upside of this is that it is supposed to be a fairly light rotation, and Dr Temple reckons that it will give us some time to travel around in what they call "the summer driving season".... we'll keep you posted on how that turns out.
Right, almost time to go and put the lamb on, but before I do that, here are some more photographs. Given that the weather here today isn't exactly photogenic, I've decided to put on some photographs that Denise and Roy sent of our garden (supplemented by Denise and mum's gardening talents) at home..
So here goes:
and finally, the sunflowers that were only 7-8 inches tall when we left home...
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