Tag: holiday

Canadian Thanksgiving

October 10, 2015

There are few things more lovely than an early October morning in Ontario.  The sky is a brilliant blue, the roadside and woodlot maples all shades of fire.  I’m going early to the farmer’s market, because this is Thanksgiving weekend in Canada, and the market will be extra-busy.

We’re having Thanksgiving dinner with my brother and his family, my adult niece and nephew home for the weekend from jobs and university, along with the youngest niece, in the last year of high school.  Our contribution to dinner will be the wine, and dessert.  I’m making pear crumble and raspberry cake.  If it’s a nice day – and it’s supposed to be, warm and sunny – we’ll arrive, chat, go out for a walk with Ginger, their labradoodle, come back to the house, open the wine, get in each other’s way in the kitchen, and sooner or later eat turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes, salad and squash.  Then we’ll all be too full for dessert, so we’ll talk some more, and have coffee and dessert an hour or so later, after the dishes are done.

The market this morning was indeed busy.  I bought pears, and the vegetables for this week’s meals, and two beeswax tapers for our dining room table.  (It’s dark now when we eat dinner, or nearly so, and we like the smell of beeswax rather than artificial waxes.)  Every stall at the market was heaped with local produce – an overabundance of choice, in deep, jewel-like colours:  the purples of plums and cabbage and beets; the reds of peppers and apples and tomatoes; the oranges and yellows of carrots and pears and golden beets, and all the shades of green of brassicas and lettuces and string beans.

Canadian Thanksgiving has its origin in the Harvest Festival of the Anglican and other churches, and there couldn’t be a better time of year for it.  It’s not the huge holiday of Thanksgiving in the USA.  But it’s still a time for many families to get together, celebrate the harvest, enjoy the autumn weather and each other.

I’ve got the pears ripening in paper bags with an apple in each, and tomorrow I’ll make the crumble and the cake.  Here’s the cake recipe: it’s never failed me.

Raspberry Cake With Lemon Drizzle

1-1/2 cups (375 mL) all-purpose flour

1/2 cup (125 mL) whole wheat flour

1 tsp (5 mL) each: baking soda, baking powder

1/2 tsp (2 mL) each: table salt,,ground ginger

2 large eggs

3/4 cup (185 mL) sunflower or safflower oil

1-1/2 cups (375 mL) granulated sugar

2 tsp (10 mL) pure vanilla extract

2-1/2 cups (625 mL) fresh raspberries

1 c semi-sweet chocolate chips, if desired

1/2 tsp (2 mL) finely grated lemon zest

Lemon Drizzle (optional):

1 cup (250 mL) icing sugar, sifted

Finely grated zest of 1 lemon

Juice of 1/2 to 1 lemon, as needed

In large mixing bowl, whisk or stir together all-purpose and whole wheat flours, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and ginger.

In separate large bowl using wooden spoon or whisk, beat eggs, oil, sugar and vanilla until well blended. Stir in raspberries and zest (and chocolate chips if used). Add to flour mixture. Mix well.

Pour batter into greased bundt pan. Bake in centre of preheated 350F (180C) oven until tester inserted in centre comes out clean, about 50 minutes.

Let cool 15 minutes in pan, then turn out on to wire rack.

If making lemon drizzle, in small bowl stir together sugar, lemon peel and enough lemon juice to make an icing of drizzling consistency.

Drizzle icing over warm or room temperature cake.

Makes about 12 servings.

Finding Space

September 24, 2015

Vacations, for me, are about finding space. I mean this literally. If a trip doesn’t include time spent in at least one of grassland, salt-marsh, range land, moorland or desert then I’m not getting what I need from it. Wide open skies in a huge blue bowl above me; views that go on for miles, the song of birds somewhere in the air.

So when BD’s cousin Liz and I went west for ten days we spent some of the time in the Rockies (almost obligatory when showing a visitor from Scotland the west of Canada) but we spent more of it in the prairies. I have no idea why I need space the way I do. I grew up in flat farming country, mostly untreed, and I carry the genes of generations of fen and salt-marsh dwellers. Is that enough to explain it? All I know is that places that others find bleak, or boring, are the places I love the most.

This love of grassland is the only part of Lena, the protagonist of my novels, that I took directly from myself. Her reaction in the excerpt below was mine, the first time we drove east from Denver and looked down on the High Plains.

Two days later, in mid-morning, we rode up from the bowl of a grassy valley between two ridges of land. We urged the horses up to the crest. As Clio came abreast of the larger horses, I reined her to a stop and looked out. I gasped.

Beyond this final ridge, the land fell away quickly in a series of declining hills. A sea of grass extended far beyond sight toward the horizon. From this height, we could see the roll of the land and the sweep and ripple of the pale, sere grasses. The sky soared above us, and the boundary between land and air looked like a hazy blur on the distant edge of vision. As I gazed at the space and enormity of the grasslands, an unrealized tension eased. I felt an inner expansion, the loosening of constraint. I could live down there, I thought, suddenly, fiercely, wanting it. I could lose myself in that land, below that sky, in all that emptiness.

This time we flew to Calgary, and drove from there, and I felt exactly the same way again at the point the land changes from the mountains to the grass and cereal lands of the prairies. I’ve walked on a few of the world’s great open spaces – the Tibetan Plateau, the Kalahari, the moorlands of northern England and Scotland, the tundra of the Canadian Arctic and the snowfields of the Antarctic – and my reaction is always the same.

BD is good about this. Papua New Guinea? he suggested, to look for birds. (It’s forest.) You go, I said, I’ll go to North Dakota. Peru? he tried, another time. He went; I spent the week in Texas birding the salt-marshes. I’ve spent my time in the forests of the Amazon, and Malaysia, and northern Canada, and I have wonderful memories. I don’t regret those trips, but thinking about them doesn’t soothe my soul the way the memories of sky and wind and space do.

What speaks to you, soothes your soul, loosens your constraints?