Experiences at the kitchen table at 5:00 or so in the morning...
Pizza!
Posted 09-29-2009 at 02:53 PM by NotEnoughTime
This weekend Sunday was pizza day. And man does Gari like this day. She helps make the dough (we make it from scratch) and she helps check the pizza sauce (made from scratch as well - with garden fresh tomatos) and she helps check the freshness of all the toppings.
Our pizzas are pretty much vegetarian in nature (with the cheese used for the topping as the only animal fat). So toppings include garden fresh peppers, Brocolli (we don't grow it - so it comes from the store), home grown corn, with (unfortunately) canned black olives and mushrooms from the store...
Gari loves the sweet taste of fresh bell peppers - especially if they've been allowed to turn slightly red. Brocolli is a standard staple of all of our diets here, and there is nothing like a piece of sweet corn picked fresh from the garden. Black olives and mushrooms are for the humans... Gari doesn't like them - which is a good thing.
This time of year is a special time of year when we make pizzas. The basil is just at the end of its life - and the plants are ripe with leaves. In another week or so there will be frost and the basil plants will turn black. So we strip the plants of all their leaves and make one pizza with just a pile of basil, a few black olives, and a light cheese topping.
When cooking the sweet scent of basil permeated our house.
Gari couldn't understand why there was one pizza without her favourite veggies on it. She kept looking at it with her sideways... What's that weird thing glance...
Last night was another of Gari's favourite activities.
We cracked walnuts.
My wife, who is from Japan, can't believe the people in this town. There are walnut trees all over Kelowna. They grow in yards, they grow in boulevards and they grow in fields... Many of the walnuts from these trees simply fall to the ground and rot.
In Japan a handful of walnuts is worth several dollars. So for the first year of our life together in Kelowna this strange Japanese woman went from house-to-house in our neighbourhood asking to collect walnuts. We had boxes and boxes of the nuts and have spent quite a few years cracking walnuts.
We now have our own walnut tree in our own yard so there is no need to go around collecting them - so we will engage in "wild bird rescue" by stepping on walnuts as they fall from the trees. We crack that hard shell so the sparrows and swallows can get to the nutritious and fatty meat of the nut.
But cracking walnuts (and hazelnuts - which also grow in abundance in this area) is an activity that we do every few months. When our kitchen nut-supply runs low.
Gari loves walnut cracking. She flys over and tries to take a large nut with her. It seems she cannot make it through the hard walnut shell without a bit of help - but when I give the nut a slight crack she can make mincemeat out of the shell and devour the meat inside. I try to limit her intake - but she is very persistant and insistant so she usually ends up with a couple of partial shells that have some meat stuck in them. She has no problem getting the meat out and the shell makes a great shredding toy until she realizes that there is more walnut meat to be had....
There was another first for Gari this week too.
The sunflowers actually had seeds left. Usually we lose all the seeds from our sunflowers to the sparrows. They will often eat the seeds when they are very green - and not leave one seed in the sunflower head. This year there was an abundance of sunflower heads in our garden. A few grew wild (probably from past heads that were turned into the ground) and a few were planted. So one small head had no seeds removed from it.
We took this sunflower head and dried it and presented it to Gari. At first she was very scared of this big, black round thing - but when I picked out one seed she recognized what it was... And there was no stopping her... She attacked the head with vigour, popping out seeds and breaking open each one to get at the sunflower seed meat.
Many of the seeds had no or very little meat - only a few are productive - so it takes a lot of work to pull apart a head and find the good seeds.
What fun Gari has had this week.
When the pizza was cooked Gari had to sample a piece. She likes breads and likes the way the pizza sauce goes with the veggies and the dough. She only eats a tiny bit of the pizza before she's full - but she can't wait for the next pizza night... Or the next walnut night... Or the next time we have a sunflower head left...
Our pizzas are pretty much vegetarian in nature (with the cheese used for the topping as the only animal fat). So toppings include garden fresh peppers, Brocolli (we don't grow it - so it comes from the store), home grown corn, with (unfortunately) canned black olives and mushrooms from the store...
Gari loves the sweet taste of fresh bell peppers - especially if they've been allowed to turn slightly red. Brocolli is a standard staple of all of our diets here, and there is nothing like a piece of sweet corn picked fresh from the garden. Black olives and mushrooms are for the humans... Gari doesn't like them - which is a good thing.
This time of year is a special time of year when we make pizzas. The basil is just at the end of its life - and the plants are ripe with leaves. In another week or so there will be frost and the basil plants will turn black. So we strip the plants of all their leaves and make one pizza with just a pile of basil, a few black olives, and a light cheese topping.
When cooking the sweet scent of basil permeated our house.
Gari couldn't understand why there was one pizza without her favourite veggies on it. She kept looking at it with her sideways... What's that weird thing glance...
Last night was another of Gari's favourite activities.
We cracked walnuts.
My wife, who is from Japan, can't believe the people in this town. There are walnut trees all over Kelowna. They grow in yards, they grow in boulevards and they grow in fields... Many of the walnuts from these trees simply fall to the ground and rot.
In Japan a handful of walnuts is worth several dollars. So for the first year of our life together in Kelowna this strange Japanese woman went from house-to-house in our neighbourhood asking to collect walnuts. We had boxes and boxes of the nuts and have spent quite a few years cracking walnuts.
We now have our own walnut tree in our own yard so there is no need to go around collecting them - so we will engage in "wild bird rescue" by stepping on walnuts as they fall from the trees. We crack that hard shell so the sparrows and swallows can get to the nutritious and fatty meat of the nut.
But cracking walnuts (and hazelnuts - which also grow in abundance in this area) is an activity that we do every few months. When our kitchen nut-supply runs low.
Gari loves walnut cracking. She flys over and tries to take a large nut with her. It seems she cannot make it through the hard walnut shell without a bit of help - but when I give the nut a slight crack she can make mincemeat out of the shell and devour the meat inside. I try to limit her intake - but she is very persistant and insistant so she usually ends up with a couple of partial shells that have some meat stuck in them. She has no problem getting the meat out and the shell makes a great shredding toy until she realizes that there is more walnut meat to be had....
There was another first for Gari this week too.
The sunflowers actually had seeds left. Usually we lose all the seeds from our sunflowers to the sparrows. They will often eat the seeds when they are very green - and not leave one seed in the sunflower head. This year there was an abundance of sunflower heads in our garden. A few grew wild (probably from past heads that were turned into the ground) and a few were planted. So one small head had no seeds removed from it.
We took this sunflower head and dried it and presented it to Gari. At first she was very scared of this big, black round thing - but when I picked out one seed she recognized what it was... And there was no stopping her... She attacked the head with vigour, popping out seeds and breaking open each one to get at the sunflower seed meat.
Many of the seeds had no or very little meat - only a few are productive - so it takes a lot of work to pull apart a head and find the good seeds.
What fun Gari has had this week.
When the pizza was cooked Gari had to sample a piece. She likes breads and likes the way the pizza sauce goes with the veggies and the dough. She only eats a tiny bit of the pizza before she's full - but she can't wait for the next pizza night... Or the next walnut night... Or the next time we have a sunflower head left...
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