works of wanderlust

Tag: long weekend delights

  • did I mention vancouver?

    It has actually been a couple months since we took a spring trip out to the west coast and spent a five day long weekend in Vancouver. It wasn’t so much that I forgot to write about it, only that I wasn’t blogging much back even two months ago (having not yet rebooted this site) and tho I had posted a few pics elsewhere, none have made their way here.

    It was mere hours away from a monumental spring snowfall back home when we lifted out of the airport on a short flight to the coast. We would watch the city-stalling blizzard through our doorbell camera while sitting in the hotel later that evening, but like old times when we lived out here, whatever the hell was going on back in Alberta was out of sight and out of mind.

    There are a million great reasons to visit Vancouver. The climate. The ocean. The food. The bustle of the city. Us? We were avoiding California. No, really. We had a trip down to Los Angeles planned for spring break and cancelled it in the wake of political uncertainty down south and the elbows up vibe around US travel. Everything was refundable except the flight credits which we spun around into a flight to Vancouver instead.

    We visited old haunts from our days living out there.

    We ate some amazing food, inexpensive and wonderful sushi, burned our faces off with hot pot, and gobbled a whole pizza on robson.

    We took a trip out to the university campus. The Kid was still considering schooling there at the time and we had a friend who gave us a little tour.

    We took in an improv show on Granville Island.

    We scored tickets to the Juno awards.

    On our Sunday morning there I woke up and did something I had never done, even in the three years living out on the coast: I ran the ten klick loop around the Stanley Park seawall. Heck, I wasn’t much of a runner back then, but I had always regretted missing out on that little adventure.

    Pangs of regret filled the weekend. We like our life back here on the praries, filled with adventure and friends and affordable housing, but I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if we had stuck it out. Twenty-one years after bailing on Vancouver we might have made it work somehow. Owned a house, maybe? A condo, at least. Spent our days immersed in a place like that which is so much more nuanced than the suburbs of this sprawling prairie city where we are now. Life would have been something else entirely. Who can really say, but I walked through familiar streets and pondered it nonetheless.

    Noting that going back to New York or Chicago is off the table for us for the foreseeable future, I couldn’t help but feel one morning, sitting in a cafe in downtown that it wasn’t that I was missing those particular cities as much as I was missing the feel of urban life. I am a guy who is comfortable in the wilderness, unreachable and alone, but I also am a bit of a city dude, soaking in the crowds and the crunch and architecture of tall building pressing in around me. Vancouver would have fit both those bills, and I spent a few hours over that weekend wondering if I missed Vancouver because that’s who I am or if Vancouver caught me at some formative moment in my life and what I’m really yearning for is my long lost twenties. Maybe a bit of both.

    There was nothing to complain about on the trip. The flights were on time. The food was cheap. The sights were accomodating. The celebrities were spotted. The rain was gone before it could be anything more than a reminder that Vancouver is less a tropical paradise than a city at the edge of a northern rainforest.

    We need to go back more often, I realize. It may not be our next trip, but I can already see another one soon.

  • May Long Weekend Gardeners

    It’s a sunshiny Flourishing Friday and on this upcoming Monday Canadians across the country will be celebrating our role in the Commonwealth and thinking fondly of dear Queen Victoria’s Birthday for Victoria Day, a Canadian statutory holiday celebrated on the Monday preceding May 25 in every province and territory, and … well, actually … mostly just having a day off from work, to be honest.

    What the May Long Weekend more typically marks is the official start of summer weather, at least on the Canadian Prairies, where campers and gardeners and adventure seekers who have been hibernating for the long winter will emerge and begin the short seasonal sprint to warm weather fun.

    For me, for at least a few hours this weekend, it means finishing the planting of my vegetable garden.

    As of right now many of the heartier, stubborn, perennial, or fall-planters are already in the ground, and in some cases sprouting.

    My garlic and onion patch has made a clear effort to get ahead of the spring rains and is aggressively showing it’s greens.

    I transferred my rhubarb plant from my now-101-year-old granny’s garden about fifteen years ago as literally the first thing I ever planted in this space, and it has also decided to make its annual appearance on time and in force.

    If you are a fan of this sour-stalked vegetable, or understand that it is an excellent baking balancer to sweet-fruited deserts, you won’t be surprised that of nearly all the garden products we grow this little plant has the longest queue of friends inquiring about “is your rhubarb ready yet?”

    I’d like to write that my carrot patch is thriving, particularly after I spent a bit of time and money installing a low-flow irrigation system a couple weeks ago and covering the whole bed in bird netting to keep the swallows out.

    While I’m sure a subset of the little green sprouts in the photo above are actually carrots, they are easily confused with another vegetable which I made the mistake of planting about five years ago that has never exited the garden fully: dill weed. Dill is lovely in small quantities, but each dill plant produces about ten thousand seeds and some of those seeds sprout this year, some sprout next year, some sprout in spring and others sprout in mid-summer. Some of those dill plants are a meter-and-a-half tall and easy to remove, while others grow barely taller than the carrots and hide in the foliage until one day you are delicately untangling their crowns from the other vegetable tops, spilling seeds into the soil in the process.

    I’ll let a couple grow. I like dill. But about 99% of what has sprouted needs to be removed as soon as I can tell them apart from the neat rows of carrots that I planted.

    At least they are well-irrigated, I suppose.

  • May Long Weekend

    Just like the saying goes not to wear white after labour day, locally there seems to be a start line for the summer season: May long weekend.

    As of posting this I’ve wrapped up my work week and I am planning how to spend the first official three day weekend of the vague, loosely-defined stretch of relative seasonal warmth that begins… um… now.

    Planting the Garden

    As evidenced by the mid-week snow storm we experienced on Tuesday night I was right to put off planting my seeds until, as my grandmother advised me, the May long weekend. Now I’ve got a small collection of packets containing seeds for lettuce, carrots, beets, radishes, beans, peas, and other eclectic veggies that caught my eye… and they are going in the ground before I go back to work.

    Priming the Yard

    While I’ve casually poked away at this for the last month because the weather has been cooperative, it’s time to get serious and get up to my elbows in soil and grass clippings. Everything needs either a trim, rake, edging, turning, tossing, or pruning, and this weekend is prime time to tackle that chore before the real growth season kicks in and I can’t keep up. That new lawnmower is going to get broken in by the end of the three-day break.

    Summer Training

    The trails are bare and the weather is perfect. While I may not be tuning up for any particular races, for the last dozen years spring and the May long weekend has always meant that it was time to get serious about summer running training. I would like to run a half marathon this summer, even if it is just a quiet, lonely run tracked by nothing other than my watch. That said, my whole crew is vaccinated and the restrictions start to lift next week so something more social is probably on the agenda somewhere.

    Family Campfire

    I’ve already been excitedly posting about my early dabbling with the backyard campfire, and have posted a couple learned lessons from the action-so-far. That said, the summer plan was to crank up the heat (literally) on my outdoor culinary efforts and May long weekend is looking to be a beautiful, sunshiny opportunity to spark up some coals, break out the cast iron and roast up some meals outside.

    Local Adventure

    And finally, while we still can’t go too far I plan on taking the dog and the family for a good local hike to explore some river valley trails or the winding paths through the local creek ravine. The news was already warning folks to heed crowds in popular parks and recreational areas around town and outside the city, but my years on the trails have earned me some secret knowledge about interesting places to check out that will likely be less crowded.

  • Ten Sweet Desserts Made Sweeter By Cast Iron

    If your Easter weekend was anything like mine, it involved a lot of food.

    And like many holidays it also happened to involve a lot of sweet desserts. Here’s hoping you got your fill of flavourful delights this year. And for next time, here is some inspiration for how to get you holiday sugar rush with help from your cast iron pans.

    1. Cobbler. Almost any fruit will do, but peach or apple slices baked with a crumbly sweet streusel topping can be scooped right from the oven to waiting dessert dishes.

    2. Apple Pie. With a flaky pastry crust, a cast iron pan makes for a natural pie pan.

    3. Dutch Baby. Call it popover or German pancake, or maybe even a Bismarck, this puffed pastry dish in a cast iron pan is delicate and tasty.

    4. Ollie Bolen. My Oma’s recipe for these small, sweet apple fritters was passed down through the generations and we deep fry in our Dutch Oven for New Years every year.

    5. Funnel Cakes. Fried in a few centimeters of oil, swirly sweet funnel cakes topped with powdered sugar remind me of being a kid at the summer carnival.

    6. Coffee Cake. A standard cake doesn’t do great in cast iron, but the dense, crumbly consistency of a traditional coffee cake works just great.

    7. Brownies. Thick and chewy bars of chocolate baked right in a big old skillet. No excuse required.

    8. Cinnamon Rolls. Sweeten your sourdough bread recipe and then roll it with butter, cinnamon and sugar. Baked up golden and caramelized are great plain or drizzled with cream cheese frosting.

    9. S’mores. No campfire required, a graham cracker, chocolate and marshmallow open faced sandwich toasted under the broiler on a cast iron skillet is a close second to the camping version.

    10. Skillet Cookie. A big lump of cookie dough smashed into a small 6 or 7 inch cast iron pan, served hot from the oven and topped with whipped cream and drizzled with chocolate syrup and sprinkles is a sharable hit for kids of any age.