A week in pictures

It’s often the case that when a week fills the photos app with colour, my desk has been conversely empty of desky activity. So, I’ve bravely dusted off my keyboard to show you some of the week here…

There was MH’s birthday which occasioned an outing at The Leaf; and aren’t they pretty, the smiling family seen through a water fall? This butterfly agreed to pose.

Then it was Canada Day and we joined a crowd of people at Assiniboia Downs. A thunderstorm broke shortly after we arrived, delaying the horse racing until it was cancelled. But we got to watch the clouds and lightning from our seats in the stand, sheltered from the rain and cooled by the breeze.

The fireworks, begun just before 10:30 were impressive: close, loud, and choreographed to last 20 minutes. Far quieter, but just as pretty, the rose a friend cut for us:

And one of the linden trees in our front yard bloomed this year. It smells so nice!

We went strawberry picking yesterday…

So many summers in a row, it’s a tradition now.

Four baskets were transformed into 19 and 3/4 jars of freezer jam, a quart of strawberry lemonade, a strawberry summer cake and strawberry-rhubarb popsicles, with more strawberries leftover for a strawberry milkshake for the kids, and maybe… a daiquiri for the adults. (But I’ve written about strawberries before… more than once!) So here… let’s end on a furry note.

Listening

Advertised on another podcast, I started listening to Outlaw Ocean, beginning with S2, episode 4: “The Repo Man” then went back and listened to everything available from the series. Episodes like “Waves of Extraction” and “The Magic Pipe” from Season 1 recall Toms River (mentioned a few weeks ago in No. 18) for our world’s continuing problem with pollution. And the latest episode in Season 2, “The Shrimp Factory Whistleblower” makes me think of themes in Behind the Beautiful Forevers. I really appreciated the more personal take on this work by Ian Urbina himself, in Season 1, Episode 7: “The Spell of the Sea”. All in all, a podcast series that I both learned so much from and enjoyed listening to, even if some of its topics were especially heavy.

Postcard

A quick phone capture of a meadow spied on a Friday night bike ride with Christian.

Happy Sunday!

Strawberries, those inoffensive heart-shaped fruit, are the centre of some of my best and worst food memories and while they remain innocent and unchanged, my view of them has deliciously evolved.

When I was little, my mom would go strawberry picking and would gather ice-cream pails full on pretty fields near the Saskatchewan River. She would bring them home and my dad would dig in like a bear until mom confiscated the buckets. Our kitchen faced the backyard willow tree and it had dark wood cabinets. In the evening I would find her in front of a sink full of water, in the smell of ripe strawberries, lopping off the stems one by one with a paring knife and stopping the blade with her thumb. The strawberries would then end up in a saucepan on the stove sprinkled with brown sugar and boiled until they floated in their own dark syrup. The mixture was poured into bags, sealed with twist ties and put in the freezer. It was one of the few things she used the freezer for because it otherwise stood in the furnace room downstairs as the designated spot for my brother’s hockey table game.

In the winter mom would take out a bag of frozen strawberries and defrost it on the dish rack. She would warm them up in a saucepan and serve them spooned on top of those little yellow sponge cakes you can buy in packs of six at the store. She would present it topped with a spoonful of whipped cream.

The funny thing about these strawberries was how my brother John hated them. My parents were strict about eating and finishing what was served. I remember more than one evening spent sitting in front of an unfinished plate of cold food, miserable, like a scene from Franzen’s The Corrections. But John would power through the obligatory dessert (mom mercifully granting him a lesser ration of strawberries) and then rush off to something else. He still hates strawberries, even fresh.

You can read all sorts of things in cookbooks and Nigella Lawson’s How To Eat is a favourite of mine. I appreciate her candour. In a sub-section of her “Basics etc.” chapter entitled “Freezer” she writes about summer fruits stored in packets as an excellent dessert back-up. But be wary of the strawberries, she warns, they “take on the texture of soft, cold slugs”, and you’d be better to “remove them and chuck them out”.

Canal House treats fresh strawberries with the kind of tenderness you normally reserve for newborns. Instead of washing them, they prefer gently wiping them with a damp paper towel because “ripe summer strawberries are so fragile and full of sweetness that we hate to have to rinse them – they can easily get waterlogged”. And once you’ve reformed your rinsing, you can reform the way you hull them too: “It kills us when we see someone slice off the top of a strawberry to get rid of its leaves. Too much of the berry is lopped off; its pretty red ‘shoulders’ are ruined, and part of the white cottony hull is usually still in place. We hull our berries not with a little strawberry hulling tool – that’s a gadget that just clutters up the drawer – but with a small paring knife. We simply stick the tip of the knife into the top of the strawberry and cut around the leaves, removing both the leaves and the white cottony hull.”

Strawberries were one of the few things my mom laboured over. While I’ve found other uses for them like jam and fresh desserts, and while I’ve learned to treat them more gently and savour their brief summer appearance, I’ve kept my mom’s effort to please.