Ooey, Gooey Cinnamon Buns

All is well in our little Saskatoon household. We had some exciting thunderstorms last week, but stayed warm and dry and not-electrified inside the house. It is amazing how much rain came down during one of the storms - I can see why people have rain barrels! We also have these amazing drain pipes that go down the house and out two metres to let the water drain far away from the house's foundation. Most houses around here seem to have them, but I had never seen them before moving to Saskatoon.

J and I were very productive this weekend. He worked his last (yay!) call shift of CTU (Clinical Teaching Unit) Internal Medicine on Saturday and I got the car fixed, went to the Farmer's Market, and finished off our engagement and wedding photo books. And managed to have a Harry Potter marathon, rereading and rewatching Harry Potter #5, #6, and #7, in preparation for my upcoming visit with my lovely cousins! (JK Rowling's little Rita Skeeter story on Pottermore definitely worked on me - I immediately dove back into the wizarding world with gusto. I even got sorted this time!) 

As it turns out, Saturday is the proper day to go to the Saskatoon Farmer's Market. When you come to visit, we will go on Saturday. At 8 AM. (You thought you would sleep in? Ha! Not when there is a new resident in the house - J has to get up super early most days, so I figure I might as well get up as well. Sometimes I do sleep in until 7 AM.) Anyways, at this market there were loads of vendors and I was able to buy fresh garlic, cocktail tomatoes, crisp radishes, and some farm fresh eggs. Our neighbours have a huge garden plot that is going crazy with all of the humidity that we've had recently, so have been giving us boatloads of lettuce and cucumbers. 

Saturday Market, full of hustle and bustle.

On my bike ride home from dropping the car off and visiting the market, I noticed that there was a dragon boat festival going on at the river. The FMG's Dragon Boat Festival was a charity event, raising money and awareness for the Heart and Stroke Foundation. I was very happy to pause for a few minutes to watch the dragon boaters race their way down the river. I had the best seats in the house, stopping on the river trail and in the middle of the bridge! 

8:30 AM view from the middle of the brige

2:30 PM view from the riverbank

As you can see, the weather certainly brightened up a bit in time for the afternoon racers! I was on my bike, on the way back to pick up the car when I went by the second time. And I am happy to report the car is now fully ready  to be insured in Saskatchewan. I'm a little sad to give up my "Beautiful British Columbia" plates, but I suppose "Land of the Living Skies" isn't so bad a slogan. It's certainly true! 

J was a bit bummed to have to do a final 24 hour call shift on Saturday, so when he texted me with his frustrations, I told him that there would be fresh cinnamon buns waiting when he got home Sunday morning. This cheered him up immensely. He was also cheerful when he got home because he hadn't been paged all night and actually slept from midnight until six in the morning. (For the record, this will not happen when he is on Obstetrics. Apparently you work all night long during call shifts. Those babies want to be born!)

So, I made the dough in the evening and let it rise in the fridge all night. Then I rolled it out and mixed the cinnamon, sugar, butter, and pecan filling together, then rolled it all together and let it rise for another hour. By the time J got home at nine, the cinnamon buns were just coming out of the oven! 

I considered taking some cinnamon buns over to the neighbours, but J convinced me that we needed to eat all of them ourselves. So, indeed we did, but we had to go for a run in the afternoon to counteract the delicious dough and butter and sugar and cinnamon working their way through our systems. Heh.

On Friday I am off for a week at Shuswap Lake with my lovely aunt, uncle, and cousins. I'm really looking forward to swimming, ice cream eating, reading, pedicures, and spending time with some of my favourite people in the world. I hope that you all have a wonderful August Long Weekend and I will talk to you all very soon!

Love, as always, 

S + J and J + S

Recipe July 21

FlatLand FlatBread

Summary: These are addictive and much more economical than buying them at $8 a pop. Here's three different flavors to try.

Ingredients

• 2 cups all-purpose flour (can replace up to 1 cup with whole-wheat flour)
• 2 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 tsp. salt (if you find them not salty enough for your taste, increase up to 1 tsp.)
• 2 cups buttermilk (I suggest the real thing)
• 1/4 cup brown sugar (light or dark, I like the extra richness of dark)
• 1/4 cup honey (clover)
• 1/2 cup roasted pumpkin seeds
• 1/4 cup sesame seeds
• 1/4 cup flax seed, ground or flaxseed meal
• For Rosemary Raisin Pecan Crisps:
• 1 cup raisins
• 1/2 cup chopped pecans (roasted, if you like)
• 1 Tbsp. chopped fresh rosemary
• OR
• For Cranberry Hazelnut Crisps
• 1 cup dried cranberries
• 1/2 cup chopped hazelnuts (roasted, if you like)
• (Optional) 1 tsp. fresh, chopped thyme
• OR
• Salty Date and Almond Crisps
• 1 cup dried, pitted dates, roughly chopped
• 1/2 cup chopped almonds (roasted, if you like)
• 1 1/2 tsp. kosher salt ** sprinkled on top before baking **
• OR
• Fig and Walnut Crisps
• 1 cup dried figs, roughly chopped
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts (roasted, if you like)
• 2 tsp. chopped fresh thyme

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350° F. Grease two 8×4-inch loaf pans or several mini loaf pans, for a smaller crisp.
2. Measure out fruit and seeds and chop nuts and any herbs and set aside. If you are using raisins, you can plump them if you like by soaking in boiling water for 10 minutes and then draining before adding to recipe)
3. In a large bowl, stir together the flour, baking soda and salt. Add the buttermilk, brown sugar and honey and stir a few strokes. Add the pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds and flax seed. Add your fruit and nuts as per the recipe specifications above. Add any herbs as specified. Stir just until combined.
4. Pour the batter into two greased 8 x 4” loaf pans (or several mini loaf pans). *If making Salty Date and Almond, sprinkle salt on top of loaves before baking.
5. Bake for about 35 minutes (less for mini loaves), until golden and springy to the touch. Remove from the pans and cool on a wire rack.
6. Once loaves have cooled, wrap or place in a freezer bag and put in freezer for at least several hours (to make them easier to slice thin). When ready to bake, remove from freezer. Slice the loaves as thin as you can and place the slices in a single layer on an ungreased cookie sheet.
7. Preheat oven to 300° F. and bake them for about 15 minutes. Remove from oven, flip them over and bake for another 10 minutes, until crisp and deep golden. Remove to a cooling rack to cool and crisp up.
8. Recipe makes about 8 dozen crackers.

Prep time: 10 min | Cook time: 50 min | Total time: 1 hour

Number of servings (yield): 8 dozen crisps

Small Appliances and the Dinner Party

Last week was fun! Our lilies are coming out and the garden is really blooming.  J and I threw a dinner party of all of his PGY1 OB-GYN colleagues and their partners, Saturday. This, of course, meant that we got to try out all of our small appliances. And cookware, serving dishes, table linens, towels -- seriously. You guys were so generous. I can't believe that we have a fully functioning, fully equipped kitchen. It's like being a grown up!

A prairie lily. How pretty!

It's been hot here lately, so I knew that I wanted to make ice cream for the group. We now have an ice cream maker attachment for our stand mixer, so I decided that vanilla gelato and strawberry sorbet were the ones for me this time. One of J's colleagues was bringing dessert (a seriously AWESOME cake, but more on that later) and I figured that a little ice cream would go well with it. So I used the ice cream maker. 

All went well with the first batch of vanilla gelato, but I had a bit of a mishap with the strawberry sorbet. Perhaps unwisely, I'd decided to wash the floors and then use my juicer to mash the strawberries. At the time it seemed efficient. In reality, I managed to knock into a bowl of strawberry juice, sending a quarter of it flying towards the floor, the cupboards, the island, the stools, but righting myself at the last minute and managing to catch the bowl before it completely spilled. There was strawberry carnage all over my beautifully clean kitchen. Now the kitchen is just extra clean, because I washed it before and after making the sorbet. Lesson learned: Plan to wash floors after making a mess. 

Now, because we were having this dinner party, I went looking for some Raincoat Crisps. You know the ones - the fig and rosemary (and other flavored) crackers that come in the fancy green or purple or yellow package. You can find them at fine grocery store's delis  and they cost about $8 a packet. Well, I couldn't find them here in Saskatoon. There's a strong possibility that I just didn't look hard enough. Or perhaps, because we are not on the "Raincoast" any more, the stores simply don't carry them. So I decided to make my own. And they turned out pretty well! 

Maybe I could call them FlatLand FlatBread. 

For the crackers I had to use the food processor (thank you, Brother-of-Mine!), the stand mixer (thanks Mum!), and the oven (thank you, Landlords!) If you're interested in the recipe, I'm going to write up all the recipes from this week in a new post. Check it out :) 

 We enjoyed artichoke dip (tried using the blender first, then went to the food processor) with the crackers for appetizers. For our dinner we served Slow Cooker pulled pork (thank you E + MC for that slow cooker!), REBAR jalapeno coleslaw, and homemade kaiser rolls (way to go J! Also, the standmixer was used here). J's colleagues brought some seriously delicious food as well: A scrumptious papaya salsa, a vibrant, Farmer's Market fresh green salad, WINE and locally brewed beer, and of course, that cake. Remember, the one that I promised to tell you about in the beginning? 

It's a show stopper. Three layers of lemon sponge cake, with a stabilized lemon-raspberry-whipped-cream-curd in between the layers. This is my favourite cake. YUM. 

The most wonderful cake of them all. 

Writing this is making me hungry. But seriously, we really enjoyed ourselves at appetizers, dinner, and dessert, even having time for a rousing game of Cards Against Humanity after supper. I really hope that we can make it an at-least monthly thing. It'll be tough with all of the residents' schedules, but I think we'll be able to do it. It's a good group! 

In other news of Saskatoon, yesterday J and I went to the gym at the university. He taught me how to lift heavy things. Today both of us have jelly legs. I'd suspect a jinx, but I know that I did it to myself through squatting, dead-lifting, and plyo. (I'd decided to show off some of my work out knowledge and started doing plyometrics in between sets. Bad decision.)

The garden continues to grow and we've got a pretty serious amount of cucumbers coming along. The green peppers are still really cute (as in, little and too small to eat) and I enjoyed a handful of fresh peas earlier today. I'm worried that I've been over watering my tomato plant, because it doesn't seem very happy. Several of its bottom leaves are yellow. Or maybe I've been under watering it? If anyone knows something about tomatoes, please let me know. I really want to have a garden fresh tomato before the frosts come in September! 

The peppers are so small, you can't even see them in this picture!

I will talk to you all again soon. Much love to you all. S+J and J+S.

Car Insurance and Other Woes of Being a Grown Up

There are some serious perks to being a grown up. You can eat whatever you want. You can go wherever you want. You can stay up as late as you want, watching rubbish TV and eating cheesies and sour jujubes until you explode. You can be a couch potato. You can bicycle across the country. There no limits to your screen time. You can go strawberry picking whenever you want (and there are strawberries available). 

Here are some perks of being a grown up in Saskatoon:

Swedish Pancakes for breakfast. Whenever I want. 

Going strawberry picking. Whenever I want. 

Fresh veggies from my own garden. Whenever I want.

More strawberry picking. Whenever I want.

Peonies blooming in my garden!

Have I mentioned the strawberries?

Peonies in my house. And piano practice only when I feel like it.

Bike rides along the river. Whenever I want. 

I'm not sure if you've got the point yet, but I'm really excited about strawberries. 

Seeing a thistle on more bike rides and being reminded of Little House on the Prairie. Whenever I want. 

More bike rides in the Land of the Living Skies. Whenever I want. 

Being a grown up is pretty great, actually, but there are also some serious drawbacks. Like having to deal with bureaucracy on your own, rather than having your parents do it. 

I've been on a several week long journey to transfer my identity as a British Columbian over to a Saskatchewanian (person from Saskatchewan?) and have only begun to see a tiny prick of light at the end of the bureaucratic tunnel. 

You might ask, what's the problem? Just deal with it like a grown up and get on with your life. I'm a teacher, so I have all summer to deal with it - true. (And teachers are clearly grown ups who didn't want to have to deal with real world problems like only two weeks of vacation every year. Perk.) But I annoyed nonetheless. It's been eating into my free time. 

So here is my issue: 

I have to get a Saskatchewan Driver's License, change my car insurance to Saskatchewan insurance, get Saskatchewan Health Care Coverage, get Tenant Insurance, change my passport to my married name, change my address for all sorts of fun things (banks, Canada Revenue Agency, CAA etc.), and then make sure that all of those things above have my married name on them. And I have to bring my marriage certificate, in a DO NOT BEND OR ELSE THIS IS VOID to each and every place where I am trying to change things. So far I haven't bent it. 

However, things are not that bad. There is light at the end of the tunnel: 

I have a Saskatchewan Driver's License. 

I have Tenant Insurance.

I changed my name at the bank and at VISA. 

But, even after all of that, here is the super frustrating thing:

In Saskatchewan your car has to undergo an inspection before it can be insurance in this province. I took it in today. The mechanic says that the car needs $2300 worth of repairs, before it can be passed and thus insured. We have to order a part in and it won't be here for a week. So I have to wait (at least) another week until the car can be insured. 

Before we left Victoria I very diligently (like a good grown up!) had the oil changed, the brakes done, and a left rear tail light case replaced (long story - short version of it, is wash your car by hand, do not go to the drive through car wash). I put a goodly sum of money into the car - nearly as much as what they say I need to do now. And now I need to bite the bullet and get the car fixed. Because come September (October? November?), I'm going to be teaching again and would like a warm car ride to school. I don't want to bike to Warman, SK in - 30 degree Celcius weather. 

So, such is life. Car bills happen. I'm a grown up, I can deal with it. Even if I am on summer vacation. 

Sunshine

The floods that hit southern Saskatchewan haven't bothered us at all in Saskatoon. Our latitude is about on par with Red Deer, Alberta, just between Edmonton and Calgary. It has certainly rained while we've been here and the river levels are very high, but we haven't had any flooding problems. Fingers crossed that it stays that way! 

J's lovely cousin and her fantastic husband drove out to Saskatoon for the Canada Day weekend. We took a trip out to The Berry Barn where the four of us had delicious Saskatoon Berry Pie and Crumble, marveled at the river levels, and walked amongst the Saskatoon Berry bushes. They're a lot bigger than I'd imagined! The Berry Barn has tons of kitschy garden and home decor for sale and I was sorely tempted by an approximately 10 foot  tall, steel giraffe.  I settled for buying a bottle of Saskatoon Berry syrup and a card for my wonderful brother's birthday. 

J's cousin also introduced us to several of her friends from vet school who still live in Saskatoon. It was lovely to meet them and we really enjoyed our Canada Day barbecue together.

This last week has been sunny and hot, with our temperatures hovering between 25 and 28 degrees Celsius. J and I are learning about what to do when it comes time to sleep: Do we leave the windows open and listen to a bit of highway noise? Do we close them and turn the fans on? Do we leave the windows open with fans on? Or do we drag the portable air conditioner up from the basement and put it in the room across the hall so that the noise isn't too much? (If it is really hot, it will definitely be the air conditioner.)

J started his first few days of work this week. After watching the fireworks at 10:30 PM on Canada Day from our bedroom, he had to wake up early on Wednesday and go to his orientation, where he and all of the other first year residents found out important information about parking passes and where to find the washroom. (Parking passes are a particularly sore subject at the Royal University Hospital right now, as there is a brand new Children's Hospital going up on the area that used to be a major parking lot. This means that many of the hospital workers have to park fairly far away and get bussed into RUH. It sounds fairly inconvenient.)

He did his first actual two days of work on Thursday and Friday - he's on Internal Medicine's Clinical Teaching Unit (CTU) for the first four weeks of residency. I think that he's happy to be started, but it is a bit of a shock to his system to have to be at the hospital for 7 AM, or earlier. He and I certainly enjoyed his time off! (I, of course, continue to have time off, until September hopefully. I haven't got on with one of the local school districts yet, but I am working on it!)

Last night we went to see the Saskatoon Summer Players put on Gilbert and Sullivan's "HMS Pinafore" and it was hilarious. The show had us in stitches the whole time! It was clearly a very high class event, because Queen Victoria was in the audience, or rather, sitting up in the royal box far above the rest of us lowly common folk. 

Today there was a Welcome Barbecue for all of the first year residents at the University Club. J and I both thought that there was going to be some sort of formal speeches, but it turned out to be really casual. We met some of the other residents (and mostly talked to his OBS/GYNE cohort and people who'd been at UBC Med School), ate hamburgers, and enjoyed ourselves. 

When we got home, we went for a bike ride up the Meewasin Valley Trail to the University and back. It's a beautiful trail that follows the river valley. We saw all sorts of wildlife (small rodents, birds, pelicans, humans, dogs) on our ride, but were in no danger at all, unless you count a friendly dog coming up to say, "Hello", as dangerous. (We had of course sprayed ourselves with bug repellent before leaving the garage. The mosquitoes are bad. I have many bites on my legs and I think I've hatched a crop in my back garden. When I went to water the plants yesterday morning, a fair few had breakfast from my legs.)

Tomorrow J goes back to the grind and I'll do my thing around the house. I've got quite a few good books to get through, we need some groceries, and I'll continue my quest to get the car insured for Saskatchewan. (I managed to change my driver's license last week.) 

Talk to you all again next week! Much love from S + J and J + S