Snow Day

Jake is enjoying the snow in front of the house. Underneath that pile is the sidewalk and about 4 feet of street where we normally park the car. We are meant to get another 15 cm dump tomorrow. If this keeps up, the house will completely disappear by February.

Food Adventures

Food is a big part of the holidays for me. Being in a foreign country, I have experienced some unusual fare in the last month at parties.
First it was cod spread. Believe it or not this was pretty good. Salt cod, rinsed until it was only very salty, flaked up and then mixed with lots of garlic and some cream. Spread on crackers or a baguette as a snack. I was told this was a traditional thing except the garlic which is a modern addition.
Then it was moose sausages. These weren't all that moosey if you know what I mean. I expected them to be gamey like deer, but mostly they were like ground beef.
Tortierre was at the same party as the moose sausage, it was ground lamb and pork in a nice pastry, but a little dry for me.
Seal flipper pie. Yes, the LeXy TD insisted on this one. We found it at the apparently famous institution of Bidgoods Grocery in the Goulds. They have a licence to sell game and it is probably where the moose and the tortierre came from as they also have quite a specialty section. We went looking for mince meat for Christmas pie, but were unsuccessful. I think seal flipper must be an acquired taste. It was a traditional meat pie with chunks of veg and gravy and a thick bread crust on top, but instead of beef or chicken it was flipper. Just flipper the label said, we made a few jokes about dolphins and bought it for lunch. Studyboy described the taste as smoked liver. The texture was stringy like stew meat but the taste was a strong smoked liver with a soupcon of fish. LeXy and I finished ours off but didn't go back for seconds, Studyboy gave his to the dog. The dog LOVED it.
We bought partridge berries at Bidgoods too, in case we never found the mincemeat for pie. I have had fresh partridge berries before, because they grow in Nova Scotia, but we have so many nicer berries there that we don't bother with them like they do here. The partridge berry jam we bought at the farmers stall is nice on toast, but the frozen berries in a pie leave rather a tart taste on the back of the tongue. "Like cranberries trying to be blueberries' is how LeXy described them. Thinking that they were a relative of blueberries and cranberries I put lots of tapioca in the pie to sop up the extra juice. Partridge berries are not as juicy when cooked so we ended up with a really thick solid filling. A jam pie.
After several attempts to find real mincemeat, we found a jar imported from England at Auntie Crae's, another institution here in town. It essentially made raisin pie. Whenever I would ask for mincemeat at a butcher or deli counter, they would try to sell me ground beef. When I described what I was looking for, one woman pointed out that there are no deer in Newfoundland so I was not likely to find any. Good point.
We saw lots of bake apple preserves too, but they were pricey and one woman said they were difficult to pick so it was worth it to pay for them. I kept asking what exactly bake apples were but really didn't get a good explanation from anyone. A low growing berry was all the description I could elicit so I googled them. They are a ground cover version of a raspberry/blackberry cousin, but yellow when ripe. It must be the prickles that make them difficult to pick. Now that I know, I'll splurge out on a small jar.

As Christmas As Moving the Furniture

Anyone who knows Studyboy, knows that he is a master at modifying his work environment to suit his purpose. This is true if the work space is a wood shop or a class room, and it is true of his StudyLair.
We had to dismantle the StudyLair and make it a bedroom because the LeXy TD came to visit for Christmas (she wanted to be called Catwoman but dc comics threatened to sue.) In fact it was necessary to rearrange the whole apartment to accommodate Christmas and another human.
The hall closet moved to the Laundry Closet so the area by the door could be Tree Central.
The Reading Chair from the StudyLair moved to the living room so all of us could sit at one time and we didn't have to play a week long game of Christmas Musical Chairs.
On the feasting day, bits of living room furniture were stuffed into other rooms so it could double as the dining room because the kitchen is too small for three to sit at the table. Truly, the living room is also too small to sit three at a table but one of my superpowers is the ability to shoehorn large objects into too small a space. It's called Yanaspace, sort of like what librarians do in L Space.
Once we moved the table out of the kitchen we realised how much easier it was to move in there. We decided that Studyboy would use the larger kitchen table as a desk in the StudyLair, and the kitchen would get his narrower make shift desk that was really just a coffee table jacked up on empty boxes. So early this morning after the LeXy TD flew off out of the sunrise, we started rearranging the furniture (again).
Away went the spare bed from the StudyLair and back went the Reading Chair into its place. The table swap happened, but instead of boxes to support the weight of the vintage 1982 microwave we snagged at a yard sale last fall, we used a small shelf unit from the StudyLair (also a yard sale find.) That shelf was used to hold up the swing arm book rest that floats in front of Studyboy's Reading Chair. Lesser humans would just hold the book in their hands, but this is what I mean by his talent for workspace modification. So today, when the rest of St. John's was out for Boxing Day Sales and Armageddon Shopping ahead of a big storm, we were out looking for a drill bit and a box of screws to jury rig another support for the book rest.

No More Sleeps!

Merry Christmas to all from the Cabot Tower in St. John's (Just to prove that we really are here and not just hiding from you all)

Happy Solstice

If you think about it. Everything is really just about how dark it is in December.
We went to a Swedish St Lucia party last week. One of Studyboy's classmates is Swedish so we learned the whole story.
St Lucia is a Catholic Saint, patron of the blind because she had her eyes poked out by a spurned lover. Her feast day is Dec 13. In Sweden, girls wear a crown of candles and sing a song, boys wear a dunce cap with a star and carry a wand. It is the Swedish festival of light. But before Pope Gregory introduced the new calendar and corrected for leap year, Dec 13 was the Winter Solstice, longest, darkest night of the year. So having a Saint with fire hair whose eyes grew back and now she can see in the darkness kind of fits.
Today is Solstice the pagan Festival of Light. We burn candles or Yule logs all night and make wreaths to attract back the sun that has gone for a holiday down south. Can't blame it really.
Later today, thanks to Prince Albert, we're going to haul a tree into the house and cover it with lights and sparkly bits. We call it a Christmas tree, but really, what does a Balsam Fir from Lunenburg County have to do with the birth of a kid in the desert?
Hanukkah finished last week. That was a Festival of Light too. Candles are really popular with everyone at this time of year, especially if the power goes out.
Lights on the house outside, a star on the tree, candles in the window.
Whatever your inclination, burn something today and bring a little enlightenment back into the world.
Happy Solstice

Christmas Samosas

Christmas is a time of traditions. Cooking is one of those traditions I enjoy. The eating bit I mean, not so much the cooking bit. Usually I just eat what other people (read: my mother) make, but that is impossible this year so she kindly sent me the recipes for my favourites so I could make them myself.
Christmas cooking has always struck me as a BIG Production. I once stayed with a Portuguese lady in Kitimat just before Christmas. Her daughters were coming home for the holidays so she was making the traditional bean salad for them. This required having the beans sit under cold running water for a week. In Kitimat she did this in the laundry sink, but at home in Portugal she explained they would be placed in the local stream. This seemed like a lot of work to me, but the bean salad was delicious.
At my mother's house, cooking was a big deal there too. I mean, there are at least 4 or 5 standard cookies alone that must be made, plus the War Cake, the gumdrop cake, and three or more pies. This is usually all done by the time I breeze in, so it is terribly impressive to see. (and eat)
The War cake was always the most intimidating. I never understood the name. Why, when it has all kinds of fruit and stuff in it, when it was so rich and moist, was it called War cake? I had a vague idea that the name came from rationing, but it seems to me that it is full of stuff that would be rationed. Cherries, dates, candied citrus; these are not local products.

Theory number 1: Studyboy thought it was sent oversees to England (where there was stricter rationing) as a present to the soldiers during the war.
Theory number 2: I thought people saved up rations for months as a treat to be able to make this at Christmas.
Theory number 3: It is so heavy and dense, it could be used as a weapon in a slingshot or a trebuchet.

All good theories, but all wrong apparently. I looked it up. Butter, milk and eggs were rationed during war time, and true War Cake doesn't have any of these things. I'm still not certain how you were meant to get the exotic fruits during naval blockades but there you are. My mother's War Cake recipe does have eggs and a bit of sugar. The sugar, I suppose, could be honey.
Incidentally, War Cake came before the 2 World Wars, I found an internet recipe for Civil War cake that is exactly my mother's recipe. I'm not saying she's that old, just the recipe.
So I was a little intimidated to make it, what with all the ingredients, plus it is huge. I imagined it taking days and days to make. My mother always seemed to make it so early, I thought this was because it took that long to make. You have to chop up all the stuff, you have to measure it out. It's a BIG production.
Turns out it's not. You can buy all the stuff pre-choppped and measured at the bulk barn. Throw it in a pot, boil it 5 minutes, stick it in a snowbank to cool, toss in the flour, throw it in the oven and have a cup of tea. You don't even have to grease the pan.
I'll tell you what is a lot of work though. Samosas. Studyboy and I went to an end of term/holiday pot luck last week, and he had the bright idea that I could make samosas. Here is the irony: War Cake if full of exotic stuff and is dead easy to make, samosas are full of bog standard ingredients like potatoes and frozen peas, and they take hours and hours and hours.
It took an 90 minutes in the morning to cut up and boil the veg, mash the potatoes and let it cool to make the filling. I cleaned up the mess and made lunch. It took an 90 minutes in the afternoon to make and roll out and cut the pastry, and then fill the pastry and clean up the mess. Then I decided to take a tea break before I fried them, so the samosas wouldn't be cold when I took them to the party. This was a bad idea, because as I was about to heat the oil the power went off for an hour. Once it was back on, it took 25 minutes to heat the oil, and that's when I learned you can't pile raw samosas on top of each other because they stick together. Happily, Studyboy had just returned from passing in his last paper and he was drafted to gently peel them apart and repair holes while I took another 35 minutes to fry the stupid things.
Next party, I'm taking War Cake.

Words

I keep meaning to add new newfoundland words to a lexicon list on this blog, but always forget them before I get here.
Tonight I learned that a traditionally shaped kettle, the squat angular type with the handle that goes over the fill hole in the top is called a slut.
Excellent.

Parking notes

About a month or so ago, the landlord's dad came by to put a new screen door on the back door and at the same time, he took away some rotting timbers that had been part of a raised garden bed in the front. The raised bed was next to the house sitting on the sidewalk pavement, and as he removed them he mentioned that if we got rid of the soil we could park there in the winter. Both Studyboy and I thought the idea of deliberately parking on the sidewalk was a little strange but we let it pass. In fact, it was the second time someone had mentioned the possiblilty of using the sidewalk as a driveway. The landlord had mentioned it too, when we moved in. We live in an area called Rabbit-town, and mostly the neighbourhood is comprised of row houses sitting directly on the sidewalk of a narrow street. Our house is an infill house, it is detached and is set back a little more than the others next to it. Our sidewalk is 5 feet wide instead of three. If we got rid of the raised bed soil we could just about fit a motorcycle in that space, but not a car, let alone the truck, unless you were planning on exiting the vehicle out the sun roof, which neither Erica or Casper have.
We let the idea pass without comment because we assumed the landlord and his dad were missing the obvious point that people would need to use the sidewalk for walking. Silly us. Now that we have had some snow, I understand that snow removal is, at best, just a suggestion in St. John's. The city gives the streets a lick and a promise when it snows, but sidewalks are not cleared by city workers unless they are close to schools or hospitals. Fair enough, but most cities have a bylaw stating that people are responsible for clearing sidewalks adjacent to their house. St. John's apparently does not have this bylaw, so people don't. In fact, people who do have driveways shovel the snow onto the sidewalk, creating undulating King of the Castle hills all the way down the street. This means, between the mounds and the iced packed footstep tracks that the sidewalks all over the city are impassable and dangerous. Everyone just walks in the streets, which is also dangerous but easier. So we were silly to assume that people would need to use the sidewalks for walking.
It turns out, people do pull their cars up onto the sidewalks for winter parking. It's like the city version of a front lawn during a summer barbecue. Now of course, the left over soil that we didn't remove is frozen solid until April, so no chance of extra parking space for us.

Now You Know

How did I ever live without high speed internet?
Studyboy and I have many dubious habits, one of which is to eat dinner in front of the TV while watching whatever bit of bad movie we can find on Space/Bravo/TCM... you get the picture. It doesn't matter that we didn't see the beginning because we have probably already seen it a dozen times before, and it doesn't matter that we will stop watching when we are finished eating because we know how it is going to end already. Tonight's Film Banal was the last 15 minutes of Dragonheart II (I did say dubious, didn't I?) But as the end credits rolled I found myself wondering what the theme music was. It was very familiar, more familiar than a B movie theme would normally warrant. We both assumed it was stolen from something or someone more famous. Like Bach or Haydn.
How to find out? Studyboy suggested Song Tapper. It is the internet sight that gives you the name of the tune after you use the spacebar to tap in the rhythm of the melody. It is a fun and amazing sight to visit and if you don't know it already, try it out; you will be amazed.
However Song Tapper let me down, because it is more geared toward pop music than the symphonic stuff. I was at a loss, until Studyboy had an even better solution; just Google "Theme from Dragonheart II." Duh. It turns out that it is an original, so we were wrong. But it is familiar because it is the most requested theme for movie trailers ever. So now, thanks to the internet, I know what music I'm humming, but now I can't stop humming it.
Well, at least it erased Nickleback's "Rockstar" from my head. That was stuck in there for days.

Let the Games Begin

Welcome December. Winter is threatening to arrive on the Avalon today as the weather network posted their first RED SCREEN of DEATH for a snowfall and mixed precipitation warning later today and tomorrow. The only hope we have is that so far the weather network has been 100% wrong on their forecasting for the city since we have been here. Unfortunately the local stations are saying the same thing so this weekend could get messy.
Let the Games Begin.