In Tofino....

I love that someone was so thoughtful as to put this up on a lamp post for me to see on my way into town everyday......

A sprinkling of snow in Tuff city...

It's been snowing here on and off for the last couple of days. In between the little sprinkles of snow we've had perfect clear blue skies and glorious sunshine. This is just how every winters day would be in my dream world. A sprinkle of pretty snow over tree covered hills but warm enough to still go to the beach and play on the swings :)

Have you ever tried....

.....painting a restaurant at night with the help of a 2 year old and 4 year old? No? I don't blame you. It's not that much fun. But, this is exactly what we've had to do. Where's Nana when you need her eh?

It needed to be done. We had had enough of the yucky dark blue walls and shiny hospital blue ceiling and after several ridonkulous quotes from painters decided the only way we were going to get this done was to do it ourselves. We armed ourselves with a spangly self-filling roller thingy and a whole load of paint and got stuck in. The time saved using the automatic roller was more than made up by chasing and chastising hyper kiddies not to mention even more time spent attending to their snacking needs and constant netflix movie requests. But like I said, it wasn't going to get done any other way. Go team Ralston! Wooo!

Our progress has been painfully slow and the poor kiddies are getting a little too accustomed to running riot,  helping themselves to cookies while we are stuck up ladders and sleeping in lawn chairs.

Slowly but surely the yucky 90's kids bedroom blue is disappearing and being replaced by a lovely warm sandy colour. It feels relaxed and comfortable and brings out the warmth of the wood. Ooooh, I'm so excited to see how it's going to look when we're all done! (Which will be in about 3 years time at this rate!)

Wish us luck!

Make butter and better choices.....because you can!

One of my resolutions for the new year is to eat well. Let me explain (hopefully without boring you to tears).... For the first two weeks of January Neil and I went vegetarian. Anyone that knows Neil will be in utter shock that he could last two weeks without meat of any sort. It's not that we don't want to eat meat we just wanted to teach ourselves that meat does not have to be a daily part of our diet. From now on we'll be much more selective about the meat we buy. As we'll be eating it less often we'll be able to spend a little more on the quality. We'll be aiming for meat that is as local as possible, organic and high welfare or no meat at all. We've already figured out the huge benefits of having a crab pot and a freezer full of fish we caught (thanks to my dear brother Dan taking Neil fishing!) And just for the record, Mcdonalds is OFF the menu! FOREVER! :) You'll have probably noticed that I've been leaning towards coconut oil and nut milk instead of dairy but again, that doesn't mean no dairy at all. We've discovered that making our own butter is actually more cost effective than buying butter in the supermarket. In our part of the world organic butter is much more expensive than organic cream. So we go and buy some organic heavy cream and turn it into lovely organic butter! For all of those of you thinking "what a load of hassle, I'd rather just buy it" pleeeease read on and pleeeeeease try making your own butter just once, it's so flippin easy you'll be gobsmacked!

Here we go.....



Step 1- Take your cream out of the fridge and leave it to stand for about 30 minutes so that it reaches room temperature. If you don't do this step it's going to take you a lot, LOT longer to make your butter.

Step 2 - Take a large jar, as large as you can comfortably hold in one hand. Fill it just about half way with your heavy cream.

Step 3 - Shake, shake and shake some more. Shake it all about so that the cream is swooshing around from top to bottom of the jar.

Step 4 - Keep shaking. Don't stop. At some point the sensation will change and the swooshing sound will stop. At this point you have made whipped cream. Keep shaking!!!

Step 5 - Keep shaking. all of a sudden the sensation will change again, you'll begin to feel a slopping sound as if you have a solid lump in thin liquid thumping the top and bottom of the jar as you shake.  You have officially made butter!! Stop shaking.

Step 6 - Open the jar and carefully strain the liquid into a cup. This is buttermilk and you can use it in baking some scones or some other yummy thing or as a base for a creamy salad dressing.

Step 7 - Put some cold tap water into the jar with the solid buttery lump and swoosh it around. drain off this water and repeat a couple of times until the water runs clear.

Step 8 - Plop your buttery lump out onto a wooden board and press down on it with the back of a wooden spoon to squeeze out any remaining buttermilk. If you don't squeeze out the buttermilk it might make your butter go sour.  At this point you can decide to add salt or not. For this quantity I'd add about  1/4 teaspoon and mix it up with the butter in a bowl. 

Step 9 - Once you've squeezed away the rest of the buttermilk, use the wooden spoon to shape your butter into a block or any other fancy shape you might like. Wrap it in some grease proof paper and pop it into the fridge.

You just made butter! Woohooo!  All we need now is our very own cow.

:)

Greeting 2012...

There were no parties for us this year. We spent our last evening of 2011 sitting around our fire pit snuggeld under blankies and eating s'mores. The kids were unusually peaceful and as I watched Seb stare into the flickering flames, I recognized the dreamy state of complete and utter peace that comes over me when I sit by a fire in the woods. He closed his eyes and I smiled and asked if he wanted to go to bed, he replied " no Mummy, I want to stay here, I'm just having a relaxing nap".  My smile grew bigger and I felt happy, as happy as I have all year. My kids, at the age of 2 and 4, appreciate the beauty of a cold night spent sitting out in the trees being warmed by a fire and that to me is heaven.

2011 was the year that brought us here to the wild west coast of BC. We've had plenty of stresses since we've been here and days that have had us both feeling so very low that we didn't really know how to pull ourselves up again but I can safely say that I have had more moments of complete peace and more moments of complete wonder and amazement and joy than any other year in my life. Where 2012 will take us I don't know but wherever it is I will do my best to take with me as much of that peace and wonder and amazement and joy as I can possibley carry.

Happy new year everyone!
x

Christmas in Wonderland....

This is my favourite photo from Christmas Day 2011. I like it because we're all in it (thanks to some kind folks also enjoying a Christmas Day beach walk) but mostly because you can see we were all pretty darned happy! There's no faking smiles like that! Ahhh, it was indeed a very lovely Christmas. Lets back track a little....

On Christmas eve eve we tested out our very own crab pot and caught our biggest crab yet, a giant and very pretty Red Rock. We cooked him up and with the huge amount of meat made some yummy crab cakes for our Christmas eve lunch. We left the kiddies with Grandad and went down to the dock by ourselves this time which meant I could concentrate on taking a few pics instead of concentrating on preventing my children from going overboard. As we walked onto the dock the sun was just going down and the trees on the hills were literally glowing in the evening light.

While we were tinkering with our bait a huge Sea lion popped up beside us and gave us a funny look. He kept his beady eye on us and popped up again a couple of times as we were pulling in our catch but he was too quick for me and everytime I tried to catch a photo of him he would dive under. This is about the best shot I got....

Even though I didn't get a photo, my little Sea Lion encounter made my day and reminded me yet again about what a special place this is.

Christmas Eve was pretty peaceful, we put out our cookies for Santa and some carrots for the reindeer and yes they were black Bean cookies, I'm sure Santa more than most needs to start thinking more healthily! The kids went to bed with a special story book which played my Dad's voice reading "The Night Before Christmas" and boy did they love it! mostly because they got to press a button on each page and magically make Grandpa Nigel start talking. I have to say I really enjoyed it too, thank you Papa! x

This is the first year that both kids have really known what's going on and that they were going to wake up to presents galore. Their excitement was adorable and most definitely infectious! Even though I didn't have any presents under the tree this year, I couldn't wait until morning! Before I went to bed I skyped my sister, it was their Christmas morning and I was just in time to see my two cutie pie neices open their stockings
 :)

Christmas Morning was a blur of wrapping paper and excited squeals. Within about 2 minutes the place went from serene Martha Stewart Christmas to complete Christmas chaos. While the monkeys played with new toy after new toy we started on our Dinner preparations and had a very lovely day brewing and drinking pot after pot of Mulled wine. Dinner turned out to be the loveliest yet and Neil's steamed lemon pudding was to die for! After stuffing ourselves and having just a little bit more mulled wine, we dragged our happy but full bodies out to the beach. It was clear and cold and there couldn't have been a more perfect way to end our first Christmas in Tofino.

It'll take me about a week to post all the other photos from our Christmas so here's  slideshow for you instead. I hope all your Christmases were as lovely and as full of giggles as ours.
xxx

When life gives you lemons....or, in our case, sea water.......

Make Sea Salt!

Apart from my five Edmonton years I've lived close to the sea all my life but until now have never made my own Sea Salt.
It's one of those totally simple things that you just accept is someone else's job. Why? I don't know. It's as simple as boiling water. One large pot from the bucket we carried our crabs home in left us with a whole tub full of perfect, beautiful, white Sea Salt just like we bought last week in a little bag from the organic shop. I'm thinking that if Neil keeps bringing me buckets and if we leave the stove on all the time, we might be able to go into production and sell it for 10 bucks a bag!

Adventures in Crabbing.....

What could be more fun on a drizzly December afternoon than catching crabs? Not much (as long as it's the right sort of crabs you're catching of course.) We've been meaning to try our hand at crabbing for a while now and after finally nabbing a crab pot from a friend we had no more reasons not to give it a try. So, armed with a crab pot, some last minute googled tips and the vague knowledge that crabs do live round about these parts, we set out to find our dinner. After a quick stop off at the local fish shop to scrounge some fish heads for bait we were off! Now one thing we do know is that most people putting out crab pots have one key tool......a boat. We don't have a boat but we didn't want a minor disadvantage like that to deter our efforts so we decided to sling the thing off the dock nearest the pub. That way we could go for quick beer and watch our spot while we waited for 20 minutes or so for our pot to fill with crustaceans. I sound optimistic and I was. It's my new thing. Dale on the other hand was less than positive about the whole affair :)

The dock was slippery and I might even go so far as to say treacherous with a 2 year old, a 4 year old, and a clutz with a camera. I continued with my optimism and hoped that none of us fell into the ice cold waters of the Pacific. Here's Neil about to don his latex gloves for handling the bait...pussy! You can tell from their beaming smiles that the kids love doing things like this. I was still pretty paranoid about loosing them into the ocean but there's nothing like a bit of immanent danger to make kids smile!

We loaded the pot with bait and slung it in. Dale handily seems to know a lot about knots so we were at least able to make our pot's rope look somewhat professional from above the water. I mean I wouldn't want anyone to think we didn't have flippin' clue or anything.

Once the pot was slung we found we were immediately surrounded by billions of large and scarier than usual seagulls so we retreated to the safety of the nearby pub.

We amused ourselves with crayons and guinness and I'm pretty sure this made Dale about as happy as I've ever seen him.

The kids enjoyed Dales stories of the old days for a while and then......they realized they'd heard this one before and decided to take action......

Apparently even covering ones ears and singing "Twinkle Twinkle" as loudly as possible doesn't make him stop. MAKE HIM STOP!!!! I'm joking of course Dale, you know I love your stories, especially the one about that emerald mine in Ecuador....

Anyway, time to head back down the dock to check on our catch.

The moment of truth.....

We had a grand total of 5 crabs! WooooHooooo! 3 Dungeness and 2 Red Rock. Unfortunatley 3 were a little on the piddly size so we had to throw them back. *Ahem*, let me rephrase that.....I had to throw them back and pick them all out of the crab pot with my bare hands because "someone" is too much of a pussy to touch crabs! :)

Back in the safety of our kitchen Neil was happy to do some crab wrangling with a pair of nice long tongs. Neil and I ate our crabs for dinner and they were yummy!

Dale ate a beef pie.