… also, happy Setsubun, if you are Japanese, and Groundhog Day (one day late).
Here on Canada’s East Coast we have been absolutely buried in snow, as has a good deal of the continent, by the sounds of it.
So, we all have time to relax and contemplate the beginning of the Year of the Rabbit, if we are lucky enough not to be shoveling snow today.
I wish you all a very happy 2011 and Rabbit Year, and hope you are doing very little shoveling!
love,
meg xoxo
I’ve been away too long.
This summer has been so, so busy! I will write a proper post soon with some photos and words and maybe even an anecdote or two, but for now it will just be this ‘icebreaker’. We can consider this sort of thing the small-talk of blog posts.
What I’m saying is that this post will be just a short one, but I look forward to returning to this space more frequently in the coming weeks.
For anyone at all interested in Canadian Literature, this poem from the Geist website is pretty funny.
“the oatmeal of world literature” indeed. Sometimes, though, isn’t oatmeal just exactly the thing?
I hope summer has been all you’d hoped it would.
love,
meg xox
the name says it all
I know that foods with the word instant in the title are totally out of fashion these days, but I’ve chosen to write about this one anyway. What is ‘roasted nuts powder’ anyway? And what does it have to do with me? You might be thinking. Well, if you are a busy person who hardly has time for breakfast or lunch, this might be just the item for you. I’m not a busy person, and I have loads of time for breakfast and lunch (not to mention dinner!) so I haven’t been drinking this lately, but there was a time when I snacked on this drink (does that make sense?) several times a week. Read the rest of this entry »
Today is my 27th birthday. I’m not usually one to make a big deal of getting a year older, but for today’s post I wanted to write a Happy List, to share with you some things that have been making me feel good lately.
What is a Happy List, you ask? Well, it’s just as it sounds– a list of things that make me happy. I used to write them all the time when I was younger and needed to cheer myself up for some reason or other. Try writing one sometime. They’re lots of fun, and your list will change as quickly as your mood does, if you’re anything like me. Today’s list will have 27 items, one for each of my years. 
Happy List: April 16th 2010 edition
1. spring
2. dark chocolate w/ mint
3. herbs (especially thai basil and shiso)
4. Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red
5. Marisa Monte
6. butterflies
I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter weekend. The weather around here was unbelievable, really. We had planned to spend the whole weekend hiking, but took Saturday off to relax on a blanket in the park, marveling over the unprecedented April warmth.
Do you know what these are?
On Friday at Oka (a lovely National park, in a village which is known in Canada as the site of the Oka Crisis) I spotted a few little spots of green among the brown leaves on the forest floor. I immediately knew what they were, and went closer for a better look. They were ramps! It was so exciting to find edible (and delicious) plants growing when I hadn’t even been looking for them. There was only one problem. That being that ramps are on the endangered list in Quebec, so we are supposed to leave them alone.
Lots of wild, onion-y goodness.
So, the very anti-climatic end to this story is that despite my joy at finding these lovely wild ramps, I decided to leave them in the forest where they were. Well, except for the few that I picked and tried raw, straight from the soil. They had a good, strong allium taste, so I was lucky enough to go on tasting them for the next hour or two (aka onion/garlic breath, big time).
We considered picking a few more to put on the banh mi’s we had packed for lunch, but decided against it in the end. I consoled myself about leaving the ramps with the thought that we still had a few hours of walking ahead of us, so they likely would have been pretty wilted and heat-weary by the time we got them home anyway.
Here’s a little more information on ramps: at The Forager Press, and The Atlantic.
And if you’d like to read about the Oka Crisis of 1990, the link will take you to the Wiki article.
So, are you much of a forager? Have you tried ramps? If so, did you buy them or pick them yourself?
love,
meg
Update– I watched an excellent documentary on the Oka Crisis, by Alanis Obomsawin. The entire film is available to watch at the NFB site here: Kanehsatake 270 Years of Resistance.
It’s an incredibly gloomy and wet day here in Montreal. However, it’s warm inside and I’m content enough to laze about this afternoon. The warm temperatures and sun we had last week and the week before gave me lots of opportunity to go for walks and check out the little flowers and green bits popping up in the parks.
Today I wanted to write a bit about coffee. We’ve really been enjoying a coffee in the morning for the past few months, brewed on the stove top. Our coffee of choice lately has been from 49th Parallel Coffee Roasters, which is based in British Columbia. We buy it here in Montreal at Cafe Myriade, which is a darling & delicious cafe downtown, right in the midst of Concordia’s campus.
I am, decidedly, a tea person. But my relationship with tea is not exclusive–I do still enjoy coffee, though I try not to enjoy it in copious quantities, or more than once per day (usually). We have gone through a few bags of the above-pictured Organic Expresso, and enjoyed it greatly. It is strong yet smooth, and very perky. Perfect for those mornings when you must get up early, but would rather not. We are currently enjoying a milder and sweeter coffee by the same company–a fairly-traded Organic Ethiopian coffee called Sidamo. It is wonderful, with a complex, sweet, fruity quality. It is not overly bitter, and is very good without any sort of milk or creamer.
And here is my new favourite mug. I found this mug at a thrift shop several weeks (months? I can’t keep track of time lately) ago, and was so impressed by his happy-dog expression and tiny trunk that I just had to bring him home.
He's definitely a morning person (elephant).
So, how about you? Do you drink coffee? If so, how do you prepare it?
love,
meg xo
Hello, dear, dear readers! If you’re seeing this sentence, that means you are still checking here for posts, and I thank you sincerely for that. I have been AWOL again, and I don’t even have a good excuse. I still think about and plan blog posts often, but have been having difficulty transforming those plans into actual, written entries.
In the past few weeks I’ve done a lot of reading, quite a bit of cooking, gone ice-skating twice, and drank a lot of tea. C & I spent Valentine’s Day in the Emergency room at the hospital (we are fine, just couldn’t get into a clinic!) which was interesting, but certainly not fun. We are not vegan (or even vegetarian) but we have been eating lots of vegan & vegetarian meals lately. Out of sheer laziness, we’ve also been eating out a few times a week. Since it has been raining and/or snowing all week here, I haven’t been buying as many groceries as I usually might. Consequently, we’ve just been using up the contents of our cupboards and fridge.
Various aloes: far left is a gel for topical use. The others are edible and delicious.
I finally got around to trying/tweaking these delicious treats that I’ve been seeing around the blogging world for the past few months. If I’d realized they were this dead-easy and delicious, I would have made them ages ago.
just a few simple ingredients...
Hello lovelies! Today is a wonderful, sunny day where I am. It’s still very cold and very… umm… February, but it is always so nice to see the sun! It does wonders for my mood. I am now reading The Great Gatsby for the first time, and actually finding it much more engrossing than I’d expected, despite the occasional deterioration of the narrative into sexist, racist, and classist comments. I am finding Fitzgerald’s sporadic lack of understanding for these issues surprising, since he is so obviously insightful at other times. Perhaps I’m blaming the words on the characters on Fitzgerald, which isn’t really fair…
Anyway, I guess one becomes bothered by these things most especially when one has just finished reading a book of cultural criticism by bell hooks, who certainly has no tolerance for the intolerance of others. It is still a good read. On to tea!
A few days ago we made a big pot of turmeric-ginger tea. I’ve made turmeric tea before, using powdered, dried turmeric, and even wrote about the tea and it’s health benefits here in this post. This time we used fresh turmeric and fresh ginger, and it was much better than using the dried powder. Using fresh turmeric also means that more of the potent anti-inflammatory properties of the root are preserved, making it even healthier. It’s not difficult to make, either, as long as you are able to find fresh turmeric. It looks much like fresh ginger root, except it has a smaller diameter and is bright orange (especially when cut open).
Read the rest of this entry »
Meaghan is a bibliophile and budding cook.
autumn
Books
botanical gardens
Breakfast
Canadian Lit.
Chinese
coffee
cookbook
cookies
drawing
Favourite Ingredients
fish
foraging
fruit
fun
Grains
Haruki Murakami
herbs
Japanese
Korean
musings
mysteries
noodles
pickles
Plants
pottery
pumpkin/squash
ramenesque
Seasons
sencha
Snacks
spring
sprouting
summer
Tea
travel
Treats
vegan
vegetables
Vietnamese
winter 
