In the footprints of Giants

  In the early 1900's Albert Bigelow Paine and Dr. Edward Breck along with 2 guides left the Milford House on a multi-day Journey along the waterways of Central Southwest Nova Scotia. They left from the beach behind the lodge and Paine recorded the story for posterity. It has become a classic tale of fishing and canoeing in the area.
  About 110 years later 2 men entered their watercraft at the very same beach, but here is where the similarities end.

  The greats of our book headed out in wool clothing in Birch bark canoes for a trip lasting many days carrying all of their gear with them. Our modern explorers were clothed in quick dry fabric paddling plastic kayaks carrying only a bit of water and granola bars and planning a morning outing.

Where our author of days gone by was interested in the number of trout, the modern day explorers were in search of geocaches. A geocache is a container left by another geocacher for those who follow to discover after downloading the coordinates to a GPS unit. No compasses for our modern day travellers.

Albert Paine was an artist with words, he would describe a scene and you would feel like you had seen it, you could smell the pine in the wind as he wove his story. Today we take a camera and capture all that we see for future reference, no reliance on paper notebooks to remind us of what we saw.

The author in the 1900's could travel for days to lakes that had seen so very few people as to be considered unknown. Today you can access any body of water by plane from a city anywhere in the world. Has our world been shrunk to fit the desires of outdoor enthusiasts.

  For all that has changed over the years and the inroads that we have made into the forests and lakes that were once nearly inaccessible, as you round a lake and see no sign of man you can feel yourself transported back in time and place yourself in the footsteps of the giants who came before and blazed a path into the forest. you can almost hear the waves breaking on the birch bark bow of the canoe, smell the smoke of the campfire as a shore lunch is fried. You can for a brief moment believe that you are alone in the wilderness, dependent only on yourself and your companions. You feel that you are master of all you survey.
  Then you hear the sound of a truck passing on a nearby road or hear the voices of children on a walk along the lake. You are transported forward by a century and are once again in the modern age and realize you are hungry and it is time to return to the campside and fire up the BBQ to make lunch.
  But for a few minutes you walked with giants.

Pavlova-When Ballet meets the Palate

  A Pavlova is a tasty baked meringue with cream and fruit on top. It is a very unassuming dessert with a contentious past. Both Australia and New Zealand have been arguing for about 90 years over the origin of the dish. Most agree that the dish was created for Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova on her tour of Australia and New Zealand in  1926. The difference of opinion surrounds who was the first to make and publish the recipe. I can't comment on the merits of each case, but I will say it seems to be a war with only winners as both sides bring out the big guns to make design and publish ever more tasty and elaborate versions. See, only winners on both sides.
  We made a Pavlova the other day. In the course of making a Boston Cream Pie, there were a number of egg whites left over from the pastry Cream.  I looked at the eggs and thought why not try a Pavlova to see how it turns out. Boy an I glad that I did.

Meringue Recipe
6 Room Temperature egg whites
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cup sugar

  I put the  eggs in a medium sized bowl and with a hand mixer beat the eggs and tartar sauce until frothy. Then I started adding the sugar as I continued to beat the eggs. Once all the sugar was added beat until you get a stiff peak. For those who are novices like me, this is when the mixture stays in the beaters and when you pull them out of the bowl and turn the  mixer over, the meringue forms a peak on the end that doesn't fall over but stands up on its own.
   I have a piece of parchment paper on which I marked an 11"(28 cm) circle. Place the parchment paper on a cookie sheet with the marked side down, you should still be able to see the mark through the paper. Spread the meringue inside the circle and try to keep it all the same thickness. This is a template to help make a better circle. If you don't have a plate that size to hold it when done, you can make a smaller circle.
  Place in an oven preheated to 250F and bake for 50-60 minutes, then turn off the oven and leave it inside for another hour. The outside will be crunchy and the inside will be a bit gooey. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool. It is very delicate and the outside will crack, don't worry, the cream topping will hide it and on first bite no one will notice a few chips or cracks.
  I read in many recipes that the least bit of yolk in the white will cause it to fail. I did have a bit of yolk in the egg white and had no trouble getting the meringue to whip. I would recommend trying to keep the whites as clean as possible.

 

Cream Topping
1 cup whipping cream
2 tsp vanilla
2 Tbsp Sugar

1 package Cream Cheese
1 tsp Vanilla
2Tbsp Sugar

In a bowl whip the whipping cream and vanilla slowly add sugar and whip until you get a soft peak.
In another bowl break up the cream cheese and add the vanilla and sugar and beat with a mixer until softened.
Using a spatula gently fold the whipped cream into the cream cheese to roughly combine.
Spread this mixture on the cooled meringue. This is the time to glue any broken bits back in place, the cream will hide and hold them.

Top with fresh fruit of your choice, the traditional are strawberries and Kiwi fruit, but I think almost any fruit would work.

  Store in the refrigerator.

 

 It wasn't nearly as difficult as I imagined and the end result was a tasty dessert that may have seemed to taste better as it was consumed among a group of friends around a campfire. We put the Pavlova in a cake keeper and put that in a cooler bag to take to the campground and it travelled fine.

My Love affair with Ginger

  I have to tell you that I am in love with Ginger. I have always loved Ginger. Well, there were those years that I dreamt of finding the island and rescuing Maryanne and living happily ever after. But other than that I have always been a fan of Ginger

  I love Ginger Ale, Ginger Beer, Ginger Snaps, Ginger Bread, Ginger Cake, Ginger Marmalade, Ginger Chocolates.  Well I guess you get the idea, I am in love with Ginger. One of my favourite forms of Ginger is Candied Ginger. I love the satisfying crunch of the ginger, the sweetness of the syrup and the heat on the tongue as you chew it. But man has it gotten expensive. And most of the ginger is dried and sugared which limits the uses. So I guess it was time to learn to make it for myself.

  I started out by buying some ginger root. It is fairly inexpensive to purchase at most grocery stores. I usually get a Kilogram(2 pounds) at a time. This makes a pretty good sized batch. Then you have to peel the stuff, this is when the love affair can go through a few rocky patches until you learn how to do it. I use a spoon and scrape away from me with the bowl of the spoon facing outward. The skin is soft and scrapes right off with no loss of the ginger.  Your house now smells amazingly like ginger.

Now you have to slice the ginger root. You want a really sharp knife for this. Cut the root across the grain as thin as you can, usually 1-2mm(1/16-1/8 in). Keep going it will soon get done. If you have large ginger, you can slice it lengthwise first to make the slices smaller.  Keep going you are almost done. It seems to take forever, but the end is in sight.


  Now you want to make a simple syrup. That is equal amounts of sugar and water. In this case for the amount above I used 3 cups of sugar and 3 cups of water. Put them in a pot on the burner and on a medium high heat bring to a boil.

Once the syrup has come to a boil add the sliced ginger to the pot and once it returns to a boil turn down to a low heat and simmer for 45 minutes. Now you can sit back for a bit and let the smell of the ginger simmering waft through your house. As the ginger cooks the smell will change and become sweeter.  You want to cook the ginger until the slices are tender crisp and translucent.

After 45 minutes of a low simmer you can take the ginger off the heat and let it cool. you can try a piece to see if it tastes done. Mmmm that was good wasn't it. If you want to just use the ginger to cook with you can pour it into a Mason Jar and put it into the fridge. If you want it truly candied you can toss it in sugar and place on a cooling rack to dry. Once dry you can place in a container and enjoy at your leisure. It would be good dipped in chocolate. If you are going this route you may want to cut the slices a bit thicker to give a good size piece to work with.





  This should give you about 1.5 litres of candied ginger in syrup.  It seems to keep in the fridge for quite a while, we have never had any last long enough to go bad, maybe we use it too quick or the sugar is enough of a preservative.

   Now that you have the Candied Ginger on hand you can use it to your hearts content. Every morning we have a hot drink made with Honey, Ginger and Apple Cider Vinegar.  In a coffee mug we put a Tbsp of pure organic apple cider vinegar(the organic is so much less acidic than the commercial), a Tbsp of unpasteurised honey a few slices of candied ginger and a Tbsp of the syrup. We top up the mug with hot water give it a good stir to mix in the honey and enjoy.   The first couple of times you try it you will cough from the vinegar fumes in your nose, I guarantee it. After that you will hopefully get to enjoy the smell and taste of your morning Cider.  It is supposed to help with gout and arthritis. I'm not a doctor and this is not medical advice, but it has helped us even if it is only a placebo effect.

  Another quick use of the syrup is to place a couple of Tbsp of the syrup in a tall glass of Club Soda and top with a lime wedge. Once you get it to your taste it is like having a glass of Ginger Beer when you need a cold drink with a bit of a bite.

I hope you enjoyed the ginger and in the future I will share more ways that we use the ginger in recipes.

Back in the Saddle Again.

  It seems hard to believe that it has been 3 years since I last posted on this blog. I first started writing it as a way to be sure I didn't get bored. I guess that didn't happen. I first worried that we would get everything done to finally settle into cabin life and then we would look around and say "what now". Again this has not happened. We never seem to have enough hours in the day to get done the things we want to do. Where does the time go.

  I was joking with someone and while ago and commented that the time passes fast because we have no deadlines. What used to need to be done by noon can now take all day, or tomorrow. There are certain hard and fast deadlines, taxes, firewood, flights, but other than that you can be as flexible as you want. This can be a blessing and a curse. The blessing comes from the fact that you don't have to do anything that you don't want to right now. The curse comes from the fact that you will eventually have to do it and if you put off everything, all your chickens come home to roost at the same time.  So it seems that time management skills while less important are still a necessary evil in retirement. I guess that kind of explains my lack of writing, it wasn't a high priority at most times that my chickens were roosting.

  Over the last 3 years there have been life changes, health concerns, a brief detour back into the working world and some trips. Thankfully none of the bad things were really bad, just time consuming and worrisome at the time they were happening. Looking back on them we can now laugh at them all and realize in the grand scheme of things we are pretty lucky to be where we are.

 One of the positives of not having written for a while is that now I have some more writing ideas that I can share. New experiences to comment on and new hobbies to pursue.

  Recently while looking for a recipe, we remembered that we had done a blog about it. A quick search of the internet revealed the recipe that we thought we had lost. A couple of nice comments when we shared it brought us to reread our own blog and gave me the desire to write again.

  I hope to see you here in the future as I share the joys that life has offered us and some of the fruits of the new hobbies we have embarked upon. *Spoiler Alert*  There might be some pictures involved.

A chance to give back a little

This  past weekend geocachers all around the world joined forces with other community groups to do a spring cleaning. For us it is called CITO and stands for Cache In Trash Out. It is an ideal that we are supposed to follow where we go into the woods looking for geocaches and bring out any garbage that we find to help clean up the areas where we play and leave our surroundings better than we found them.

Icon given to geocachers who participate in a CITO

CITO events are held the weekend after Earth Day and are organized by any geocacher who is interested in hosting an event to clean their area. These events make a huge difference in the areas where they are held. Geocachers who participate in a CITO event earn an icon on their gocaching page to show that they have attended an event that year.




We were lucky to have three events close to us this year and we headed Saturday morning bright and early and attended a highway cleanup in St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia with about 30 other cachers. We collected about 60 large garbage bags full of trash from the side of the highway through a mostly residential area. A real highlight was when one homeowner came out yelling her thanks and telling us that we were making her neighborhood look much better.

One load of trash picked up in Tantallon

Cachers and their cleaned area

One of the most unusual finds

Saturday afternoon most of the same people headed to Tantallon, Nova Scotia and there we teamed up with the local ATV association to clean a section of trail that was recently purchased by teh provincial government and opened for use by all Nova Scotians. The ATV members ferried the geocachers along the trail and picked up the full garbage bags to transport to the trailhead area. It was a great learning experience for all attendees as we learned how the ATV association maintains and polices the trails and they learned what geocaching is all about.
I don't think any of us had an inkling of how much trash was hidden along the trail. At the end of 3 hours a total of 7 1/2 truckloads of garbage of all description was found and bagged and taken to the collection facility. There was now a total of about 5 km of clean trail for all to use and enjoy in a beautiful area.

Trash collected in Bridgewater

Sunday we headed out in the afternoon on a day that promised rain and delivered on the promise. About 15 hearty souls from across the province braved the elements to clean a local carpool parking lot near Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. Teh area was cleaned fairly quickly and about a dozen bags of garbage were cleared from the area leaving a much better impression of the highway.

Before the cleanup

After the cleanup

As we were traveling to and from our events we saw the same thing being repeated by school and community groups everywhere we looked. It was great to see so many out from all walks of life giving back to their communities. There were no complaints about the work or the temperature, everyone seemed to be enjoying the camaraderie and feeling of doing something good.

This is something that doesn't need to happen once a year. If people would stop littering, the problemn would go away. Unfortunately I fear that won't happen. I think it is a better chance that we try to educate people to do just a little bit each day, if you pick up one piece of trash on your walk, the world will be a better place for you having been there. If more people see this type of behavior they may start to do the same thing, then think how beautiful the world could become.

How it could look if we all did our part

We enjoyed our outing and love the feeling that we got from Giving Back A Little. Try it you'll like it.

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Good Morning Sunrise

I think that our favorite time of the day since we have retired is Sunrise. When I was working, it was a chore to get out of bed in the morning, the alarm demanding my attention and lunches to be packed for the day ahead. It was faced with a sense of not quite dread, but not with anticipation. There was no time to stop and appreciate the morning in the mad rush of preparation for the days labors. That all changed the day that I officially became retired.

Since we have retired, we have not had to rely on the alarm to get up in the morning, unless we are off on very early morning trip. Mornings are met with anticipation of the days promise. We have no plans and very few demands on our time. A day is allowed to unfold like a flower blooming and reaching its full potential. Some days are slow to awaken, their grey covering wrapped around them like a security blanket, protection from the weather to come. Other days arrive with a bright yellow glow to announce that they are here and all is right with the world.
The best mornings are the ones that start off with a burst of color painting the sky in bright vibrant hues as if to make up for a forecast of later day storms. It seems to be true what the old timers said, "Red Sky At Morning, Sailors Take Warning". The most vibrant sunrises are nearly always followed by a storm later in the day. Maybe this is nature's way of apologizing in advance for the day to come.
A perfect morning is one spent on the deck, having breakfast and enjoying a steaming cup of freshly brewed coffee as the sun rises out of the earth. Each day brings a sunrise from a slightly different perspective as the sunrises march back and forth across our view with the march of the seasons, lighting our lives from a slightly different angle and shining light into different corners of our lives.
A beautiful sunrise is a fleeting event, here one minute and gone the next. Most of the color being displayed just before the sun crests the horizon. A beautiful sunrise is more about promise and anticipation than about the actual rising of the sun. It is a great metaphor for the day ahead, carrying all the promise of what is to come. We look forward to the scene that will greet us each morning as prepare breakfast and take the time to marvel in the spectacle that is presented each day for a fleeting moment.


I think it is fair to say that an early morning has become the favorite part of our day. It gives us the chance to relax and prepare for the day without the hustle and bustle that were for so long a part of our lives. Having a relaxing start to the day goes a long way toward making the whole day relaxing.






So sit back and relax and enjoy the show that is the world around us.

Smells like....whatever you choose.

It has been a while since I have taken the time to write on this blog. You would think that being retired would mean you have all the time in the world, it just doesn't seem to work out that way. I think part of the reason is that we take on more projects to do ourselves that we might have hired out when we were working. I also like to think that we are taking the time to learn new skills to help us in our retirement.   
  We love learning to do new things that help to save a few dollars or to make a healthier product for us to use. In the past we have talked about the cooking that we have tried, and that is a great way to have a good healthy meal at a lower cost and I like to think that cooking together has brought us closer at a time in our lives where too many people seem to find that they have nothing in common anymore.
  We like to make some of our own household products. One of the first that we tried was making our own deodorant. We looked at the cost and then after all the reading about the nasty chemicals that are absorbed by our bodies, this project seemed like a no brainer. And to top it off it was so easy. We were a bit skeptical about it at first, but we bit the bullet and gave it a try. With a little trial and error we have come up with a product that we both like and that works for us. We are able to get most of the ingredients at our local bulk store. The initial set-up costs a bit, but most of the ingredients have multiple uses.

  Homemade deodorant

2 Tbsp Coconut oil
5 Tbsp Arrowroot Powder
5 Tbsp Baking Soda
a few drops of essential oil( we like Lavender or a Lemon/Rosemary mix





Once all the ingredients are in the bowl, mix with your hands until you get a pretty solid ball. The heat from your hands will melt the coconut oil and allow everything to come together.







We saved some old stick deodorant tubes and just pack the mixture into them after winding the mechanism down to the bottom. 








When using this deodorant, you only dab it on your underarms, it takes very little to do the job. If you notice some redness it might be the chemicals from your old deodorant coming our of your pores or it could be a reaction to an essential oil. This recipe will make enough for both of us to last about a month. I wouldn't recommend increasing the recipe as there are no preservatives in it and if it last longer it could cause problems since you are using organic products that will break down over time.

The original recipe called for 1/4 cup each of baking powder and corn starch. We found that the extra baking powder made the recipe a bit abrasive and could cause chafing. We switched to arrowroot powder as it is less likely to cause a yeast infection, it is more naturally resistant to fungus and bacteria.

One of the things that most retirees agree on is that you have to live on a fixed budget, it is not easy to make up any shortfall if your budget doesn't balance. This is just one of the ways that we have found to cut costs and have a bit of fun doing it. We also make our own laundry soap, which sounds like a topic for another blog. We do most of own repairs and building projects. We recently laid our own hardwood floor in the kitchen at less than 1/3 the cost of having it done by someone else. These are all skills that we develop that save us a few dollars and also give us a great deal of satisfaction as we use utilize the items we have built. 
If you have anything that you do to save a few pennies or you want information about any of our other ideas, please feel free to leave a comment.