Life in Cowtown

It’s time to get your drinking face on, and tie your bibs!

Fall is most definitely in the air, as our chilly weather and rain outside can attest, and one of the great things about fall is the return of the Rocky Mountain Food and Wine Festival!  I’ve gone the last two years, and had an absolute blast. See here for recap.

This year, courtesy of the wonderful PR team of the festival, I have a pair of tickets to give away to the Friday evening portion of the festivities (it also runs Saturday), so leave a comment if you’re interested to be entered to win.

Details:  Friday, October 14 (Calgary BMO Centre)

Hours: 4-10 pm

Notes: Tasting tickets purchased separately (0.50 ea)

Must be 18+ to attend, no minors allowed

See you there!

Fall by Sherlock77 via Flickr

I’m finally emerging from the coccoon that was woven by a new job. You know how the first few weeks at work kind of make your brain hurt, even though you’re not doing anything fundamentally different from your last job? That’s been me. Learning new software, adjusting to new names and faces takes mental juice, and for the last few weeks I’ve been coming home substantially more tired than I normally get at work. At least the weather’s been keeping true to course with cloudy rainy days suitable for all work and no play. I’d have been justifiably ticked if it was sunny and gorgeous while I was too wiped out to enjoy what could  have been our one week of summer. Did you know we’re expecting snow on Thursday, by the way? Just wanted to throw that out there.

So I took it easy on myself – I often came home and had a nap before rising to exercise, dinner and chores. I didn’t plan anything more strenuous than meeting frriends for supper or a beer at the pub, and in general practiced the principle of conservation of energy. On weekends I puttered around the house, and got around to harvesting all my tomatoes which are now ripening slowly on my counter. So far I can confidently say that Sungold tomatoes are tiny globes of pure sweet sunshine, and both Black Prince and Carbon are totally worth growing. Everything else is up in the air for now, and for Christmas I want a greenhouse.

I also tried my hand at canning – my first foray into this venture, and of course I started with pickles that I adore with a loving love. I made a reasonable sized batch of baby dills using two methods – one modern, with proper heat canning, and one old school. The results were telling and phenomenally different. The heat canned pickles tasted totally flat and boring. They could have used triple the seasonings and will need to be amended with further vinegar, salt and garlic. The old style pickles – made by simply pouring hot brine over the washed cukes, and sealed without further processing were amazing. Effervescent with slight fermentation they shined with tang of garlic and dill and smoked with the heat of horseradish. My family, no slouch when it comes to pickes, promptly declared them the best homemade pickles ever. I’m already taking orders for next year, except for the fact that I eyeballed the recipe and it may be hard to duplicate.  

Other than that, the one shining accomplishment of the week involves calling an appliance repair man to fix our limping dishwasher. For months now (don’t laugh, we know we’re lazy and complacent), our dishwasher has been doing a very intermittent job washing cups. For some reason it would leave tiny specks of debris in some to many of our cups in the top rack that if heated dry, would be glued to the cups with a strength that would put gorilla glue to shame. Some days it would leave most cups clean, other days most would be unusable. Of course our appliance manual was worse than useless, leading us down a lovely diagnostics chart that failed to mention such an occurence at all, and full of useful advice to unplug the dishwasher if going in there with a screwdriver, something I was not about to do. Since James hasn’t had a full weekend off since about June, he was adamantly not spending his precious free time taking apart an appliance that was bound to turn into a painful chore. So we seethed at the dishwasher and contemplated buying a new one. But in a fortuitous coincidence I came across an ad on our company intranet advertising an appliance repair company, which I called so fast the phone was smoking. I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner, see lazy and complacent, above, but seeing that ad triggered an immediate action response and within seconds I had an appointment.

Within two days my dishwasher was as good as new, at the price of a tenth of a new one. Apparently it was the common issue of a clogged trap, clogged with miscellaneous crap consisting mostly of labels that peeled off the cans that made their way in there. According to the appliance guy dishwashers are equipped with a tiny garburator, but it’s so weak that paper gums it right up. Very common problem, he said. Of course there is no accessing that trap without taking apart half the dishwasher, but hey. At least now a major irritant is gone from my life. For anyone in the Calgary area, I can now highly recomment Gavin at GWCM Service Inc. (403) 828-4926.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m a summer person through and through. I love long days that don’t seem to end, I love seeking shade from the hot sun in the sky, I love how easy it is to get dressed in the mornings what with the not looking for stray mittens, hats, scarves and debating whether a face mask is going too far or not. I love slipping into sandals and not worrying about socks, boots, and cracking your head open on residential roads that never see a plow. I love summer food – the bounty, the abundance, the freshness, the perfect ripeness of a sun warmed strawberry or a tomato.

But I live in a northern land, three thousand feet above sea level, at the foothills of majestic mountains and surrounded by wide prairies. Winter is a fact of life here, and it’s often harsh. Temperatures plunge deeply and without warning, snowfalls bury the city making roads impassable, and winter often lasts beyond all rhyme and reason. This is not a winter from an LL Bean catalogue where families frolic in the sunny meadow building a snowman and sipping hot chocolate. You just know the weather in those photos is hovering just below zero, while you contemplate the arctic parka from Canada Goose while there’s a blizzard outside.  And while always welcome in the winter, Chinooks unleash their own mayhem raising temperatures by thirty degrees in hours turning roads into deep slush piles and melting everything in sight.  In fact, I’ve recently cultivated an appreciation for skiing, to my own surprise, just so that there’s something else to do besides hibernate by the fireplace.

So around here we need the fall, bittersweet that it is, to ease the transition between the summer fun and the bitter short days of winter. We need to feel the shock of that first night below zero and to begin acclimatizing so that in January we can wear a t-shirt on a sunny + 10 day with impunity.  We need to watch the leaves change colors, and bunnies replace their brown summer coats with snow white down. We need to start making stews, chilies and roasts because the oven is just another convenient way to warm the house. It’s like a fireplace only tastier.

Because all too soon we’ll be surprised to see this on our doorstep (only twenty days after our summer high of 32 C), which is nature’s way to dispense with slow acclimatization and just employ some shock therapy on our hides. Just to keep us from getting complacent and all.

 Photos  by my talented friend Warren Sable who actually knows how to use his camera.