November in the Kitchen

This fennel grows in the back garden with the fig tree.  Swallowtail butterflies like this plant.  I wanted to try some seeds or leaves of this plant in the meatloaf to get that anise flavour... but I did not really get that taste from this fennel plant.  I might need to get the Florence Fennel that grows bulbs and has that flavour.  It is said to grow easily from seed, and is treated as an annual.  This will have to go on my wish list for plants next year. 
I made some scrumptious cornmeal muffins.  So good hot out of the oven with too much butter, of course.  And then I had to find a recipe for cornmeal bread or muffins with fennel.  .  . and found one for cornmeal muffins with bacon and fennel seeds.  I can't wait to try this one too.  Both of these recipes use buttermilk.  There goes my weight loss program.  But it is using 'less' wheat!
I managed to finally finish my June album for the gardening page, of my old web site.  It has 16 pages with 10 photos per page.  I seem to be getting more and more albums to do, that I do not seem to have time to get done.  Especially on the travel page. 
A couple of days ago I found another garden center using one of my rose photos on their website.
I complained on my FaceBook page, and on their facebook page.  I sent them a contact form from on their website, emailing them to forward $250 to my PayPal account.  They deleted the photo from their website, and deleted my comments off of their FaceBook page.  And what a co-incidence!  The same day they deleted the photo off their website, I received a PHISHING email regarding my PayPal account.  This garden center is in England, Rhinegold Garden Center.  They were using my photo of a rose that was grown in Canada to advertise their roses.  Not only are they thieves, but liars too.  I guess I shouldn't expect any compensation for the use of my photo... the one they stole off of this blog, from people with such shoddy businesses practices. 

November Gardening

This decorative kale is in a pot on the deck.  I can see it from my computer desk.  I added it and a couple other Fall transplants last month.  I have a Mum, and a Viola, in pots that are doing fine.

 This is the golden delicious apple tree before we picked the apples.  We have 36+ lbs of applees stored in a couple of bins in the lower level.  I have moved my frozen soups, etc., from the gridge down there into my new deepfreeze that I keep in my computer room.  I need a cover for this appliance as it is glaring white.  Something in green would be nice.  I made a heaping apple pie 2 days ago.  It is pretty good.  I also have a few packages (593 ml) of apple sauce made and frozen.  We are eating the apples fresh every day and they are very good.

 One of the many pumpkins that have a second life as they appear along Cordova Bay Road where it goes through Mount Doug. park, all along the roadside.  Some of the designs are truly intricate.

A row of the jack o'lanterns on display along Cordova Bay Road in Mount Doug Park.

November gardening has been all about preserving the fruit from the plum and apple trees; and making and freezing soups.  We are trying to stay away from the salty store bought versions of soup.  I use mushroom soup and tomatoe soup in casseroles.  Otherwise, our soups are now homemade using chicken stock , beef stock, or fish stock..all homemade too.  The soups are so very tasty and nutritious made from fresh vegetables, dried beans, peas, grains and other good things to eat.

Have your children teach you well

 This is a photo from Sept.  As you can see the view is from on the Model T on our Can-Am meet in September.  I am still processing these photos for upload to my account at Megashot, where I will link the Can-Am participants when finished the album.  Still have lots of photos to process.

 This is the 'foxy' frame that I learned how to take from any one I saw on the net, and so, make it my own frame to add to photos that I could process through Paintshop Pro.  There is also a way to create your own frames for PSP.  Tutorials are available on the internet.  Choose any one you like.  This matter of frames came up in a discussion on a photo on Megashot.  I could make the frame on that photo my own, if I had the time.  It is not a very exciting frame, so I did not play with it.

Here is a Scaboisia flower, from June.  I am currently working on the June album of the Gardening page on my old web page.  I have 4 more pages to code and then I can upload the album to the page.  Slowly getting the Gardening page finished... but getting more and more behind in the Travel page.  

 With regard to the Travel page... This is a photo of the Parrot  in the Nazca lines in Peru.  We flew over these ancient displays when on our trip to Ecuador and Peru a few years ago.  I was looking over some of the photos and discovered that I had this Parrot depiction photographed, after all.  I have the Hands and the also the Whale.  I was so pleased to find that I had these three.  I thought I only had the Hands previously.

 The Whale from our fly over the Nazca lines.   Apparently, these ancient lines and graphics are now in danger of being destroyed by feral pigs.   Any wind would be equally destructive.  I am so glad I had the opportunity to get the photos I have.  They will eventually be appearing on my old web page on the Travel page.

I received this cute .jpeg in email recently.  It is about how I feel, too.  With all the changes and constant updates, I get just a little bit disgusted with my desktop PC and its updates and logins, etc.  My Ipad does not seem to give me this bother, but I cannot accesses things I may want to, on the Ipad, either... like ABE books... at least, I have not found their AP yet.   And on and on it goes...

YOUR CHILDREN SHOULD TEACH YOU WELL...

Can I borrow your 12 year old grand child to help me out with my computer?

Teach your children well . . . Part III

 Some of our B.C. forest in the mist.  We appear to have plenty of of forest to counter act the production of carbon dioxide parts pumped into the atmosphere, but bio-engineering states that we need to reforest in the tropical rain forests as well as keep what we now have.  On a more personal scale, I think everyone should plant trees in their city gardens to help 'clean' the air.

Mount St. Helens seen from the window of an airplane in March of 2010.

More Mount St. Helens.. you can see a bit of Spirit Lake in the photo.
From Wikipedia ==
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_eruption_of_Mount_St._Helens

The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, a stratovolcano located in Washington, in the United States, was a major volcanic eruption. The eruption (which was a VEI 5 event) was the only significant one to occur in the contiguous 48 US states since the 1915 eruption of Lassen Peak in California.[1] The eruption was preceded by a two-month series of earthquakes and steam-venting episodes, caused by an injection of magma at shallow depth below the volcano that created a huge bulge and a fracture system on Mount St. Helens' north slope.

Prior to the eruption, USGS scientists convinced local authorities to close Mount St. Helens to the general public and to maintain the closure in spite of pressure to re-open it; their work saved thousands of lives. An earthquake at 8:32:17 a.m. PDT (UTC-7) on Sunday, May 18, 1980, caused the entire weakened north face to slide away, suddenly exposing the partly molten, gas- and steam-rich rock in the volcano to lower pressure. The rock responded by exploding a hot mix of lava and pulverized older rock toward Spirit Lake so fast that it overtook the avalanching north face.

An eruption column rose 80,000 feet (24,400 m) into the atmosphere and deposited ash in 11 U.S. states.[2] At the same time, snow, ice and several entire glaciers on the volcano melted, forming a series of large lahars (volcanic mudslides) that reached as far as the Columbia River, nearly 50 miles (80 km) to the southwest. Less severe outbursts continued into the next day only to be followed by other large but not as destructive eruptions later in 1980.

Fifty-seven people[3] (including innkeeper Harry R. Truman, photographer Reid Blackburn and geologist David A. Johnston) perished. Hundreds of square miles were reduced to wasteland causing over a billion U.S. dollars in damage ($2.74 billion in 2011 dollars[4]), thousands of game animals killed, and Mount St. Helens was left with a crater on its north side. At the time of the eruption, the summit of the volcano was owned by the Burlington Northern Railroad, but afterward the land passed to the United States Forest Service.[5] The area was later preserved, as it was, in the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.

 About Geo-engineering - this term seems to mean any way to take carbon dioxide out of the air, or block some of the heat from the sun, as the forests and volcanos do, naturally.   The book also speaks of seeding parts of the ocean with primarily iron to encourage plankton to grow, which is another natural air cleaner, and feeds the marine life, as well. 
 Quote from page 196 of Gwynne Dyer's book, Climate Wars:
Paul Crutzen is a Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist who risked his entire reputation by suggesting, in the now famous article originally  published in Climatic Change in 2006, that it might become desirable or even necessary to put sulpher dioxide into the atmosphere in order to raise the planet's albedo (ability to reflect sunlight) and thus avoid runaway climate change.  In doing so, he quite deliberately re-opened the public debate on the taboo subject of geo-engineering.
.....
Page 198...
Geo-engineering must not be discussed in front of the children, because if they know about it they will behave badly.
... Quote from an interview with James Hansen, Director, NASA Goddard Space Studies Center, with the Author (Gwynne Dyer) June 28, 2008....
The human burning of fossil fuels is geo-engineering.  The suggestions that we encourage re-forestation and the use of bio-char and the storing of carbon in the soil -- they're bio-engineering, but they're of a fairly natural order, and they have multiple benefits, so nobody would object to those.  There are other, more extreme geo-engineering things that we could do -- and I say we should of course do all the other things first -- but you may get to a point where you see the ice-sheets are on the verge of collapsing.  Then you have to consider these other possibilities.
I think the one that Paul Crutzen and others suggested -- putting sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere so it forms sulphuric acid droplets, a human-made volcano, in effect -- is an interesting idea.  You might say that's dangerous, because we don't know what's going to happen, and to some extent that's true even for Crutzen's suggestion, but nature has performed that experiment.  The Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991 is interesting because it was large enough that for one year -- that one year after the eruption -- it was reflecting back to space about four watts of energy per square metre.
That's cancelling out the equivalent of doubled carbon dioxide, the equivalent of 560 parts per million of carbon dioxide.  It's a big negative forcing.
One interesting point about it is that if you look at the melting in Greenland for the period when we have data, which began with satellite measurements in 1978 - 79, until the present, so thirty years, the year with the least melting was 1992, when those aerosols had maximum optical thickness.  The sunlight has to go through them at a slant angle to hit this high-latitude ice-sheet, and it reflected enough sunlight away that it minimised the melting.  So if the concern becomes especially these ice-sheets and their impact on sea-level, then you may have to seriously consider that.  But frankly, it makes more sense to reduce the forcing that's causing the problem.
...end of quote.
Teach your children well....