this past week

I've been juicing every day! It's crazy. Even right now I'm craving some juice, but I'm just feeling a bit lazy about cleaning the machine.

I've realized that I need an extra 15 minutes in the morning so I can juice and then clean the juicer.
I make enough so when I come home I can have juice in the evening. I use to come home and have a beer.


For a week I was hooked on a beet, apple, pear, and ginger combo. It had that deep red colour from the beets, and the pear gave it a nice texture. It was the best.

This week it's been anything goes. I do find apple, carrot, and ginger is a good base to start with. Today I made pineapple, celery, carrot, pear, and ginger. I stopped taking pictures though because I don't want to bore you with endless pictures of juice.

As for the rest of my week...

The time flies by so quickly.  It's just one juice after another and then the week is gone.

Wildlife Rescue has been going well. I'm getting use to the routine of it. I've started working on my next level of volunteering so I can take on more responsibility. The staff are so nice and helpful. I can see myself volunteering there for a while. It does get quite busy in the spring so I'm glad I started in the winter when it's quieter so I can ease into the job.

There was red tailed hawk in this past week. I've never seen one so close-up before (probably a good thing). They are quite impressive. He stared at me as if he had no fear, and maybe even as if he could kill me.  The rest of the birds are mostly pigeons with the occasional robin or thrush.
***

Wednesday we went to see the Blues as they were in town to face the Canuckleheads (as we call them). db and I sat up in the nosebleeds and watched the game. I enjoyed it even though the Blues gave the Canucks two goals as if gifts. After that game I decided I wasn't going to watch hockey for the rest of the season, but they were in Edmonton next and I just had to watch because I suspected they'd win, and guess what?

The last 3 days have been work, work, work. I haven't had any time to bake or do anything fun like that. Maybe tomorrow I'll try a new recipe from my brunch book. I should make something nice for my day off, something to go with my juice.

Vacation

I'm back after a little vacation, and then a week of just getting back into my work routine.

My mom was visiting for a week, and I took a few days off. I barely opened the computer at all, so I haven't been making my rounds.

We had a nice visit. Here's what we did.

The Brackendale  eagles are famous. You may have heard about the annual eagle count that is done in early January.

This year the count was on the low side (956). On average there is around 1600 a year. Imagine at the peak what it must be like!

We started in Squamish at the official "Eagle Viewing" site, and then we drove further along one of the roads to see if we could see others.

That's where we spotted this one atop a tree.

Then these two (a juvenile and an adult) were perched next to a creek.

We drove along Paradise Valley road where all of the trees are loaded with moss. It's not that uncommon to see trees covered in moss on the we(s)t coast, but this whole area is unique because it had tree after tree after tree covered. It turns out that it's a protected area funded by the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

 

On the way back to the highway, we spotted another eagle. It's near the top of one of the trees on the left.

I zoomed in as far as I could with my camera and tried to steady it on the car to snap some photos. I did get a few nice ones. I tried taking a video, but whenever I selected the film option, the eagle would stop moving all together. I swear he knew what I was up to.

They are beautiful birds, and I feel very fortunate to have seen so many in such a small area.

Near our place we see them occasionally, but they are soaring so far above that we never really get to admire their beauty. At our last place we would see more because of the sloping green belt that was fairly open, so I think the eagles like to hunt there. We're more enclosed by the forest where we are now. I do love watching them soar high above in the sky though.

Thursday we went to Seattle. We started off at Pike Place Market. I think mom really enjoyed it.
Here's the flower area. In the summer it was full of fresh flowers. It was nice to see it was still vibrant full of beautiful dried flower arrangements. I think if I lived in Seattle I would buy my flowers here, and always have an arrangement in my home.

I didn't really take many pictures in Seattle. The weather was pretty damp, and we were more about getting to and from places. Plus, I had taken so many pictures of the market and downtown last time we were there. I guess I should put them on my flickr page. I'll do that after this post.

I did, of course, take pictures of our food. We were seeking out a vegan restaurant on Broadway Ave, and couldn't find it. We finally went into the grocery store and asked if someone knew of it only to learn that it was now the grocery store!

So we went back to Pizza Pi, which was fine with me. Mom had never been, and db and I were ready to try something else on the menu.

db had a calzone, and I had this lovely pizza with a sundried tomato cream sauce topped with olives, spinach, and artichokes. Of course they use teese on all of their pizzas.

Mom had one of their sandwiches. It was very good food.

Mom asked why they didn't use the daiya cheese, and they said it didn't work well with their ovens. I'm kind of glad in a way because teese really is a good product, and daiya has taken the vegan cheese world by storm. I'd like to see teese continue to thrive as well.

We did bring back a dozen donuts from Mighty O donuts (I really like their website as well so check it out). I mean...vegan donuts! Need I say more? They also serve a very nice coffee. If you're going to the coffee capital, you should at least have coffee. There is of course an obscene number of Starbucks (it's Starbuck's hometown after all), but there are also numerous independent coffee shops serving their own roasts or a local roast.

I really like Seattle. Next time we go, I'll take more pictures. I guess you can just go to Google Maps and wander the streets on the street view, but I like the personal photo better (not my photo by the way).

Of course it wouldn't be a fun vacation without the girls. Prima and Gigi loved having mom here.

Prima sometimes gets a little overwhelmed when there are too many people to keep track of. It's mostly just db and I so she hops from one lap to the other. She likes to be the center of attention all of the time. With mom here, she wasn't the center of attention, but did still get a lot of pets from all of us. She's very needy. 

Gigi particularly liked having the sofa bed open in the living room. Some days we never made up the sofa because we knew we'd be out all day, and the girls liked having the bed out to lounge on.


Even after mom left, I kept the duvet out for them to sleep on.

The cats had a nice vacation as well, and they really deserved it after the craziness of the holidays with trees in their room, people for dinner. They really needed the break! Ha.

Juicing fun

Mango, apple & banana. I tried the puree disc option that came with my juicer. We had one overripe mango, and one perfectly ripened mango; it was a perfect opportunity to try the puree disc.

The mango pureed pretty well. The smaller portions stayed pulpy so there were some chunky bits in the juice, but that was expected and we didn't really mind. The banana went through very smoothly. Blender? No thanks.

I switched to the juicer disc and added some apples to make our juice. Very tasty.

So, the puree disc was a nice surprise. It made a very creamy smoothie.

My next creation was an empty-the-fruit-bowl juice.

Our fresh produce box gets delivered once a week, and was on its way, so I decided to juice the rest of the fruit we had left. It was all pears left over in the bowl, and just one apple. I zipped some fresh ginger through (we love the zesty ginger flavour in our juices), and then added a carrot, a beet, and the fruit.
The beet gave the juice the beautiful colour. The picture actually doesn't bring out the full red colour that it really was. The beet was a little tougher to juice. I am reluctant to put any force on the food plunger since everything pretty much runs through by itself, and they recommend that you don't use any force, but the beet needed a little push. I think that's okay. Bottom line, the juice was refreshing, and felt like the pick-me-up I needed.

(P.S. db thinks I might be working for Breville because I take photos of the juice next to the juicer. I assure you I'm not working for them, I just like the backdrop.) 

lemon cashew crepes

This is the brunch book. You saw my photos of the Tofu Benny? Let me refresh your memory from my Christmas Day post.

There's been a recipe in the book that I've wanted to try, but was a little intimidated at the idea of making crepes. It seems silly because I've made injera, tortillas, and canneloni crepes. So could crepes be that much different? Yes.

I did have some success, but I think I would have had better success if I had the proper tools i.e. a thinner spatula, and maybe even a crepe pan. Yes, my regular frying pan worked okay, but it's a bit too large, so I couldn't get a uniform size to the crepes.

That's okay though because they were delicious.

The filling is a lemon cashew cream, and they were topped with a blueberry sauce. I put the traditional dusting of powdered sugar to top them off. I have to say it was all worth the effort.

Michelle Obama featured in fur-free ad.

Woo-hoo! I was so glad to see this, and very happy to see that it made the news.   It's great to see powerful and influential women say no to fur. You can also read more on PETA's site.

Run Holiday Vegan Run update

I'm running, I'm running. I haven't written about my running much lately, and that was mainly because I wasn't running much lately.

I did take a solid 2 weeks off from running, and just did a little yoga to still feel like I was making some sort of attempt to keep in shape. Since Christmas day I've been back at it, building up my endurance again (how quickly it goes). Christmas morning was cool and beautifully sunny outside. There weren't many runners out that morning, and the one I did see wished me a Merry Christmas.

It was a little icy in parts. I had to watch my footing when crossing the creek bridges since they ice up a little. It was a glorious run. I hope to make it a Christmas tradition from now on.

We had such dry weather that I really was trying to take advantage of our luck. A couple of days after Christmas I ran, and it was another clear and frosty morning. I decided to run to the bottom of the hill towards the inlet because I suspected that the ground would be drier there. However, once down by the inlet, I discovered the sidewalks were more slippery that they had been at home. I tried to run on the crunchy grass until I went into the park where I could run the trail. The trail was hard from the ground freezing, but the traction was so much better. I ran until I thought I'd had enough, and then even managed to run up the hill home. That's the first time I've done that, and it felt fine! It took me almost 10 minutes to run up it, but I did it.

New Year's Day I wanted to have another run like I did on Christmas Day, but it was pouring. I stayed in, hoping to run later in the day, but the rain never eased up.

The Sunday after New Year's (oh that's this past Sunday!) I had better luck. Even though it looked pretty dark around our place, I could see the sky breaking up down at the inlet. I loaded some new music onto my ipod (Transglobal Underground), and headed out. It was one of those tough days when my legs feel heavier than they are, and all I want to do is stop.

I ran to the inlet with plans of running the trail again, but once there I had an achy calf and achilles so I thought I should ease off and stick to the paved trail with the strollers & cyclists. Without planning to, I ran further than expected. I knew I wanted to do a long run and went for it, forgetting that I should just increase by 10%. Oops. I was too far into my run to stop, so I kept going.

I'm a little sore today. Tomorrow I'll try to take it a bit easier and do a short run before going to the wildlife rescue.

CBC News - Canada - Setting the stage for a spring election

What do you think? Is this Harper's plan?

CBC News - Canada - Setting the stage for a spring election

Juice Vegan Juice

Here it is. This was the best gift ever. I've been juicing since I took it out of the box.

db got an excellent deal on the juicer, and jumped at the chance to bring this into our home.

It has a puree disc and a juicing disc, so I can do softer fruits as well (like bananas, mango, berries etc) and make smoothies right from the juicer.

This afternoon I felt like a little pick up so I made us some juice from pineapple, apple, cucumber and ginger. Delicious.

I love this machine. Is it possible to love a machine? Well, I love what this machine can make for us. 

A simple New Year's resolution is to make more juice!

I can't wait to make my first all veggie juice!

Happy New Year!

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!