Recipe for Bean Mash

Recently I've read an article in a triathlon magazine about nutrition. Gone are the ways of the past when we consumed large amounts of pasta, rice, potatoes etc. in order to get in the carbs. Now we're being told that we should be swapping the refined pasta for quinoa, the white rice for wild rice or barley, the mashed potatoes for mashed beans! As for the quinoa, sometimes it doesn't settle right in the stomach, I like it but Paul doesn't. The main point of swapping pasta out is to get creative in finding healthier alternatives for refined foods such as pasta (white pasta). I have tried whole wheat pasta before and it's just not the same so we went straight back to regular pasta because we knew we needed pasta and our mindset wasn't on an alternative. Every triathlete eats pasta, that's just the way it is. But not anymore.
Now I get to the mashed beans. I thought it was crazy to think of it as a substitute for mashed potatoes until I tried it. It tastes great and so I want to share it with everybody. Ideally you want to find some canned cannellini or butter beans but any kind of white bean would do. It doesn't have to be canned either, it can be dried but it's a longer process of soaking overnight and then cooking them until they're soft. Anyway, I got canned navy beans to try so here's my simple recipe.



1 can of navy beans
1 clove of garlic, chopped fine
extra virgin olive oil
dried thyme
sea salt

Drain the can of beans, rinse. Put in a sauce pan and cover with water. Bring to a boil and heat the beans through. Drain the water. Add approximately a teaspoon of extra virgin olive oil, garlic, dried thyme and sea salt. Mash with a potato masher until the beans are of a smooth consistency.

And there you have it. It looks just like mashed potatoes, it tastes good and it's full of beany goodness.

Cross Stitch

My cross stitch pattern is finally complete. I got the pattern from wal-mart a few months ago intending to give it away as a Christmas gift to my cousin who is a dog breeder. The only ever cross stitch pattern I had done before was a small marvin the martian that I eventually stuck onto a pillow in high school. So I thought it would be easy as anything to cross stitch a dog. I was so wrong! I realized that it is so much easier to do something that is just one solid colour (like a cartoon) rather than make something lifelike and use multiple colours to fill in fur.
Now finally it is done, three months later. I'm actually glad this is a gift because I've looked at it enough, it's beautiful but I want it out of my sight. Which is probably the reason why I like giving things away so much. If I resolved not to give any of my items away I would probably not have got to where I am in my knitting, which I enjoy much more than cross stitch.
I guess I'll just stick to knitting then.

Did I mention I'm teaching Paul how to knit :) he's done two rows!!!! Go Paul!

Jiaogulan Tea

At Teaopia (one of my favorite places to visit) I tasted a very small sample of Jiaogulan tea. It didn't taste like anything at the time and it didn't smell too much either which is why I got it. Paul doesn't really enjoy sitting next to me if I have a particularly smelly tea. Anyway, I got this Jiaogulan tea and brought it home. It's pretty much some kind of Chinese herb stuck together and all balled up using "light sucrose"(a fancy name for sugar, but sucrose sounds much healthier doesn't it?). When it is steeped the ball comes apart showing off the leaves and stems of the tea.

This tea is described as the "immortality tea" probably because it is drank in the regions of China where many people exceed the age of 100. The tea was first discovered in 1406 as a plant to gather and eat in a time of famine in China. The Jiaogulan plant is a vine and grows like a weed there, but it is a very attractive looking plant. I wonder if I could get myself a little potted Jiaogulan shrub and have my own steady supply of "immortality". It kind of makes me laugh to write/say "immortality" it makes me think of that really cheesy film Highlander, the first one. The only thing I can remember from it is the beginning with his little wife growing old and he doesn't age. But then again she doesn't look like she's aging either, she's just the same person with a grey wig on. Maybe we can explain it by putting it down to the highland air... or maybe she had Chinese connections and was drinking their tea? who knows.
Anyway, back to the tea!
There are many health benefits associated with this kind of tea. One health benefit is that it is good for someone with a sore throat or even bronchitis, however, I've always thought any kind of tea would be sufficient in soothing sore throats.

But what about the taste? you may ask, is it worth it to drink this tea? Personally I think the tea tastes like dirt, but it smells nice so I kept drinking it and it got better over several steepings of the tea. It is meant to be steeped up to five times for about five minutes each time. As it's being steeped I think it kind of resembles a murky fish tank without the fish.

Spaceship Pretzel

I found a soft pretzel recipe the other day and decided I would like to make them... seeing as Paul likes them so much. It was also a child friendly recipe which encouraged to get the kids involved in kneading the dough and rolling it out to form the pretzel shapes. It was quite a messy business, kneading the dough. Countless hunks of dough fell to the floor, but it was fun and we still ended up with enough for all of us. The kids got to make fun shapes and I stuck with the traditional pretzel shape.

The taste was the same whether it looked like a space ship, snake, heart or pretzel.

Snow

Recently we haven't got much snow here in Alberta, but not too long ago I was in the house waiting for Paul to come back inside from being in the car. I looked out the front window not to find him walking up the walkway but in the front yard stepping around in the snow. I think he was trying to find the ground under it all but I doubt he succeeded. Anyway, I went outside into the freezing cold to take a picture of him.... mostly to take a picture of the magnitude of the snow though.

Valentine's day

Well, we had a very busy Valentine's day today in which I was woken up by the kids running through the house shouting "Happy Valentine's Day". There was a party at the school we all went to with crafts, snacks and card giving.

At home I made a card on the computer and printed it out for Paul :) then I made everyone some delicious heart shaped chocolate chip cookies. A few days ago I made heart shaped soft pretzels but they were too much of a hassle to make again. I made a playlist of love songs to listen to throughout the day including: Bless the Broken Road by Rascal Flatts, Love Like Crazy by Lee Brice, Unchained Melody by The Righteous Brothers, (Everything I do) I do it For You by Bryan Adams, From This Moment by Shania Twain etc.... Then I stuck in The Hockey Song by Stompin' Tom Conners in there too just because my son had hockey practice that same day.

Paul got off work just after the practice was finished and I made him big dinner of steak and potatoes. Afterwards he went on his bike rollers downstairs and my cousins came over with presents for the kids. They showed us their new baby goats that they just bought. The goats made so much noise but made up for it by looking cute.

Anyway, after the kids went to bed Paul and I watched the last couple parts of the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. I think it's the best version even though it's over 5 hours long, I've spent approximately three days watching it. I'm not sure if Paul enjoys watching movies like that with me or not but I have found out that he did watch the movie version of Pride and Prejudice with Kierra Knightly in it when it was on TV a while back. He told me it didn't make any sense at all but made him laugh at the parts that made even less sense. I remember him telling me one day that he saw somebody walking down the street who looked and dressed exactly like Mr. Darcy... I wish I had seen it.

So then ends my thoughts on Valentines day. A lot of cleaning up candy wrappers and craft projects from yesterday this morning, but first I'll finish my tea. Paul gave me a really neat little contraption from Teaopia for our anniversary and I use it nearly everyday so I thought I would take a picture of it with a background of the view out our front window.

Scottish Wool hat

Remember when I washed, carded and spun a whole bunch of wool I got from a farmer in Scotland just outside of Selkirk? If not, I suggest you look back through the blog and refresh yourselves because I have finally made something out of the yarn that I made. It's the natural colour of the sheep, so it's from the yarn I made that I did not dye red/orange (that yarn is contemplating an uncertain future as a decoration amongst carding supplies etc on top of my bookcase).
The design of the hat was a bit of an improvisation. I had made fingerless gloves with a knotwork pattern before, so I took that pattern and changed the knotwork to make it look more like a continuous sailors knot... if it can be called that. I used two knitting needles to begin with and made a headband using my celtic knotwork pattern. Checking the size on my head to make sure it was the right size, I sewed the beginning and end together but it turned out too tight. I ripped it out and added more of the pattern. After I did this I used four double sided needles to make stitches around the top of the headband and create the top head part of the hat. I knitted along using the stockinette stitch and decreased when I felt like it needed it until I turned out with this (see picture).

Back In Canada

We'll we've been back in Canada for quite a number of months now. We actually have been doing some quite exciting things here that are worthy of being written on the blogspot, however, my laziness when it comes to writing has taken over until now.

I think I should start with the things I missed about Canada that I never knew I missed until we were actually here. Getting off the plane was a rushed kind of business as well as hitting the road from Vancouver for another long haul trip in the car. It was in the car that I realized that I had picked up one of those accents where it neither sounds Scottish or Canadian but Canadians thought it sounded distinctly Scottish or sounded like I was from Newfoundland depending on who was listening and what I was saying.
I could say that I was emotionally moved by the snow capped mountains of the distance, the smell of the air, the Canadian flags or even the size of the roads.... but those things all paled in comparison to our first visit to Timmies... yes Tim Hortons! We pulled into the Tim Hortons parking lot, piled out of the car and headed toward the doors (me with a huge smile on my face). Mom held the door open for me and then it hit me, the beautiful aroma of freshly brewed Tim Hortons coffee brought tears to my eyes. Now i know what you may be thinking.... but it wasn't the fact that the coffee smell was so strong it made my eyes water, that's not what I'm saying. It was all purely emotional, tears of joy, "I'm home" sort of thing. It was an emotional ordering of my usual large double double and everything bagel toasted with herb and garlic cream cheese.
I missed having cream in my coffee, in Scotland they only give you milk (and it's not because they're trying to be healthy, nobody's trying to be healthy there) I don't really know why they only give you milk, I think it's a tea thing.... and their coffee isn't right either (not that I'm complaining) but their fresh coffee is an americano (espresso and water), I never got a taste for those... and if they don't have an espresso machine it's instant coffee, instant never quite hits the spot. Then there's the bagels and cream cheese.... no, Scotland can't get them right either, my problem is that I demand perfection... so over there I became a tea drinker, simply because the coffee wasn't up to par, but the tea!!!!!! the tea there is perfect, and the chocolate there is excellent. I do miss the chocolate there, and it's taken me a long time to get over my addiction to pizza crunch (even though the amount of grease in it made me sick for at least a day), but that's a different story.