Life at Last?

My gosh!
In the one area where the snow has receded enough to actually be sure there is solid ground underneath, there are now...what?....daffodil shoots coming up!!!

Of course, I still need the really big boots to cross the side yard to get near them.













And look how much the snow has retreated from the winter burrow that was the garage! (Of course, now we're looking most like tinkers...but that will get better when we dare take the tarps down. Once we're sure there won't be feet more of snow...)

Signs of Spring?

This is my attempt at getting a zoom shot of my beloved cardinal.
He's back, and comes to sit in the top of one of Larry's trees for
conversations.









Then there's the river in a pretty rushy kind of mood, and Charv helping me scout it out.







Then we have the eejity guy deciding he should go right out onto the ice, even though we do have open water in the shallows. Fortunately, he didn't fall through. (I've had to deal with that before! ) Though he did look a little like an inexperienced skater as he skidded around a bit....


Then, up a tree,for a more panoramic view...














and finally for Karen, our version of mud.









(and since I didn't manage to make it clear on the last post, I ended up as Frigg(a) on the quiz.)

v

Sort of a silly quiz....

and I rarely bother with these, but it seemed more appropriate than some...



Which Norse God or Goddess Are You Most Like?

From The Twilight Zone

Actually, from the laptop, but there's a similar feeling to it.... *AND* it
is being all gray and snowy and depressing out there. Does that count?

Yup, techno-woes again.

The power supply fan on my computer has been sending out occasionally grumpy
noises over the last while, and it suddenly got a bit more 'in your face'
than I could ignore.

I thought, oh, I'll just pop the HD in the 'back up' machine. Which is
actually a step up from my old back up machine, and which I'd been using for
a few months last summer and fall. Unfortunately, my current HD has never
lived anywhere but in my main PC, so it didn't have specific drivers it
needed, and started getting all paranoid and upset.

I thought okay, I'll use my second HD, which I've been slowly trying to
clean up so I could try loading Win2000. Of course, it's not empty, so it
had too much memory of Windows to load a new version and not enough to do
anything else.

I finally opted with a shaky set up involving a 2GB HD as the master and
slaved in my regular HD, only to find the modem wasn't working properly,
there aren't a real selection fo serial ports and my cables and adaptors
seem to be misplaced...

ACK!

Hence the laptop. Which while sluggish, and far too tiny for my great
mammoth fingers, does at least work and dial out!

And wouldn't you know it, I had only just run out of my stay of execution
and been forced to switch to the "new and improved" blogger, and was really
hoping to make some headway in figuring it out.

Nah...another day.
Hopefully I'll get a new power supply installed and can try to sweettalk all
my hard drives back into their original positions without too much angst.
(Angsty - V?)

And obviously I need to find out about drivers for the other machine. No
point in having it as a back up, if I can't make it behave!

Anti-V

A Hankering for Curry...

Now that our mini-melt, the two-day 'heat wave' is over, and we're back to
chillier temps, I was getting the urge to make a curry. (Not that I require
winter to give me an urge for a curry….)

As it happened, on a trip to town and the grocery store, there were some
'scratch and dent' eggplants. So, that inspired a pan of moussaka, which fed
us two evenings, with a Greek salad and some roast potatoes. (And some more
portions into the freezer. Yea!)
But I still had a little bit of eggplant left over.

When I still worked in Toronto, back at the Atrium on Bay, there had been a
really lovely restaurant there, (one that actually seemed to be surviving
and successful!) possibly called A Taste of India. One of its most enjoyable
features was that it served two luncheon buffets, one of which was
vegetarian. Now I'm as carnivorous as you can get, but have both friends and
family who aren't. And it was really nice to have an occasional place to
meet for a lunch, where my guest wasn't reduced to a grilled cheese
sandwich!
One of the nicest dishes they served (and they served many many nice ones)
was an eggplant curry. I've been forever searching for a recipe that would
allow me to recreate that, or even the merest hint of it.
So I dug up yet one more recipe on the Internet to try. And that, with a
basic curry made with pork, and a nifty recipe from my brand new and
delightful cookbook, Mangoes and Curry Leaves, Culinary Travels Through the Great
Subcontinent, by Jeremy Alford and Naomi Duguid, to allow me to use my
scratch and dent green beans…, made for a quite yummy supper.

Baingan Bharta (Eggplant Curry)

* 1 large eggplant
* 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
* 1 teaspoon cumin seeds
* 1 medium onion, thinly sliced
* 1 tablespoon ginger garlic paste
* 1 tablespoon curry powder
* 1 tomato, diced
* 1/2 cup plain yogurt
* 1 fresh jalapeno chile pepper, finely chopped
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 1/4 bunch cilantro, finely chopped

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F (230 degrees C).
2. Place eggplant on a medium baking sheet. Bake 20 to 30 minutes in the
preheated oven, until tender. Remove from heat, cool, peel, and chop.
3. Heat oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Mix in cumin seeds and
onion. Cook and stir until onion is tender.
4. Mix ginger garlic paste, curry powder, and tomato into the saucepan,
and cook about 1 minute. Stir in yogurt. Mix in eggplant and jalapeno
pepper, and season with salt. Cover, and cook 10 minutes over high heat.
Remove cover, reduce heat to low, and continue cooking about 5 minutes.
Garnish with cilantro to serve.

I scaled it back, because I only had a half an eggplant left, and have had
some not too appealing previous attempts at eggplant curry, and didn't want
large quantities of leftovers in that case. I also decided to use some of a
leftover tin of diced tomatoes in place of the fresh tomato. Instead of a
chile pepper, I think I just added a shake of cayenne. (Now I'm reminded
that I have some Thai red chile paste that might have worked. Oh well. I do
tend to try and make milder curries, since Darrell's not too thrilled by
spicy food. And I find I don't eat things as hot now as I once did, any
way.)

It wasn't the eggplant curry I'd been hoping to make, but it was a very nice
one all the same, and I think I'll be trying it again sometime.

Nepali Green Bean-Sesame Salad

1 pound green beans or yard-long beans
3 Tbsp sesame seeds
2 Tbsp peanut oil or vegetable oil
2 green cayenne chilis, seeded and sliced into rings
½ tsp salt
2 to 3 Tbsp fresh lemon juice, to taste
Chopped coriander leaves or several mint leaves, minced (optional)

Cook the beans in a large pot of boiling salted water until just tender and
still firm. Drain, refresh in cold water for a moment, and then drain again.
Trim the beans and slice on a diagonal into ½ inch lengths. Set aside in a
bowl.
Heat a dry heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Add the sesame seeds, lower
the heat to medium, and dry roast, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon,
until lightly touched with gold, and aromatic. Transfer to a spice/coffee
grinder and grind to a coarse powder, then set aside.
Heat the oil in a small heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Toss in the
chopped chiles and stir-fry for about 30 seconds, or until lightly touched
with brown. Pour the chiles and hot oil over the beans and toss. Sprinkle on
the ground sesame seeds and salt and toss. Add the lemon juice and toss.
Serve warm or at room temperature. If you wish, add chopped coriander or
mint to the salad just before serving.

This was a real winner! I'm definitely going to make this one again. It's
nice to find some accompaniments that are not too labour intensive, or it
becomes real chaos as I try to get everything ready for the same moment. I
tend to do that way too much!

And it will make just another interesting way to serve beans. I find that
when beans are in season, I always end up buying a lot of them, and it's
nice to find a couple new ways to use them. This had a nice international
flavour to it, without it seeming out of place with other menus.

And not having a fresh Cayenne chili (or indeed ever having seen one, and
certainly not in this neighbourhood), and being too lazy to rummage in the
depths of the freezer for the little Ziploc of finely chopped frozen
jalapenos that I have, (good idea that, I must do it again. Simpler than
trying to pickle them, and is actually proving to be something handy to
have,) instead I used a few dried chili flakes, and a little dusting of
cayenne powder.
But the aroma of the toasted sesame seeds in my mortar and pestle was
heavenly, and the flavour in the salad was great. Definitely a keeper!

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Cheap Thrills

So, we had our little two day mini-spring. It was exciting. The drive turned to mud and tried to eat me. The cats were happy and the sun made their fur hot! But see what a change, at least as far as the deck goes....



This is how it looked back on Feb.7th. (And actually got deeper after that...)




This is how it looks after the last two days of 9 degrees Celsius.
Even the birdseed that's been buried and buried is showing again. Of course, right now, there are more things out there for the birds to eat...

The Wild Life