Category: flora and fauna

Flowers and Chocolate

I actually came across these dark chocolate and floral bars well before Valentine’s Day, and if I had my act together, would have posted about them before now. The collection is by Belgian chocolatier Dolfin and is called The Parfums d’Eden. It features 4 different flowers (rose, violet, verviene [lemon verbena] and orange blossom), offered in 30g bars of 60% chocolate.

We found these at Aren’t We Sweet in St. Lawrence Market, but they should be available wherever Dolfin chocolate is sold.

All of the bars smelled and tasted strongly of the included flower, although I didn’t get a lot of lemon either on the nose or the tongue with the verveine. In fact, the dried flowers within the chocolate had an almost tobacco-like taste and smell. No sign of lemon whatsoever. I wasn’t familiar with verveine as a flower – didn’t know it was “verbena”, so imagine my surprise to discover that the flavour is meant to be lemony.

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Fish Fight

If your favourite fish is salmon, tuna or cod (yes, sushi-eaters, I’m looking at you), you’re part of the problem.

It’s not so much of an over-fishing problem anymore, since fishers in most countries adhere to strict quotas. The problem is more that the quota system doesn’t really work.

Trawlers go out onto the ocean, drop net and scoop up everything that gets caught in that net. But they can only bring ashore anything that is within their quota. If they’ve already met their quota of cod, and there’s cod in that net, what happens to it? It gets dumped, usually dead, back into the sea. So besides doing absolutely nothing to stop the “overfishing” of cod, it wastes a lot of otherwise edible fish that could be going to feed people. In most cases, UK fishers are having to dump 50% of their catch because they are not legally allowed to bring it onto land. They can still *catch* it, they just can’t sell it.

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Moldy Oldies

In 2002 or so, I was tested for allergies and started immunotherapy. Mold, dust and a few other things were the culprits, and I had been having problems for years, especially in the summer. Unlike many people, immunotherapy (aka, a weekly needle) worked great for me. Except the doctor I was dealing with didn’t really explain the whole process to me. Like the fact that you do the shots for about 3 to 5 years, and then after another 3 to 5 years, the allergies usually come back.

I stopped getting the shots in 2005. I had broken my arm and it was inconvenient. And the program had worked. I thought I was cured. A couple of years ago the allergies started coming back. The first time was when the lunchlady from the daycare directly below us thought it would be a good idea to start an open pit compost system in the garden below our window. If you’re allergic to mold, rotting moldy produce is not something you want under your apartment windows.

This spring, when every person who had ever been allergic to anything experienced symptoms because of the weather, so did I. And it was bad. That whole itchy watery eyes thing became burning eyes, as if someone had thrown cayenne pepper in my face.

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Spring Things

 

Due to the mild winter and early spring, we are about 3 weeks ahead of the season here in Toronto in terms of plants and gardens. I’m hearing stories of fiddleheads and asparagus showing up at farmers’ markets already, and the lilacs (which usually are in bloom for Victoria Day) are fully in flower and smelling amazing. So I grabbed the camera when I was out doing errands earlier – here’s what the neighbourhood looks like right now.

I sometimes call this time of year “confetti season” because as the winds blow the petals off the apple trees, it makes the sidewalks look as if they’re covered in confetti. This apple tree on Gwynne Avenue is particularly fragrant.

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Signs of Spring

Out and about today, I saw a number of signs that winter is done and we’re moving on.

Birds – cardinals in the morning twilight as we walked the dogs, calling back and forth to one another. Mourning doves sitting on a hydro line, cooing softly. And while I was waiting for a bus, a whole swarm of chickadees (a group of chickadees is actually called a “banditry”, which is awesome, but these ones were almost swarming) were all over the pine trees in front of my building.

Flowers – no crocuses yet, but there are tiny white fritillaries in many of the yards nearby.

Spring cleaning – people are out raking leaves, picking up litter and cleaning windows. They’re also blasting the spring cleaning music – on my walk this afternoon I heard Lady Gaga, some funky jazz and Guns and Roses, all playing on radios while people worked nearby.

Drunk guys in the park by the medical centre. Here’s to a summer without setting anything on fire.

I also saw my first pair of sandals, to complement the many shorts that people were wearing.

It wasn’t an awful winter really – not a lot of snow, not especially cold. But spring sure is nicer.

Everybody’s Heard About the Birds

Every year we go to the Royal Winter Fair on the first day, and every year we go home disappointed. Not because the Royal isn’t awesome, it is! But because we always forget that the poultry competitions don’t take place until mid-week. This year, we held off and attended the fair on Wednesday, specifically to check out the hundred of truly gorgeous birds.

I should have been taking notes because I have only a vague recollection of the names of the breeds for most of these, but these were definitely the best of the best. Slightly disappointed to see so few really rare breeds – a few silkies and a frizzle, but not a crested Poland in sight. Still, these birds are all really beautiful, and it’s really interesting to see how much they vary in size and colouration.

The observant will note the absence of any male turkeys  -despite my best efforts the buggers would all turn and shake their tail feather at me, every single time I tried to take a shot.

Thirty or so photos to follow, probably not of much interest unless you’re a bird lover, but they are pretty darn cool.

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Floral Study in Blue

Further to my post about wildflowers, I decided to gather some when Greg and I were at the farmers’ market at Liberty Village  last weekend. There’s a low fence around the parking lot where the market takes place and on a whim I plucked a few cornflowers, some huge red clover and a head of Queen Anne’s lace from the scrubby unmowed grass. I came home and popped them in a small vase and took some quick photos, hoping that I’d get some good ones; the colours match my shower curtain and I’ve been looking for some decent artwork to hang in the bathroom for a few years now.

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Wildflower – Crazy ‘Bout You, Yeah

However you feel about gentrification – and it has it pros and cons – it has to be said that part of its purpose is to clean places up. Clean out the grubby building, the grubby litter, the grubby people and all that grubby scrub at the side of the road. Gentrification means pristine lawns and swept walks. Sure there are flowers, but they’re there on purpose – well trimmed and watered and chosen to make a statement.

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Quincy

Toronto is known as “the city within a park”. Just about every resident lives with walking distance of a park, although most of these are not huge multi-acre swaths of land, but are little in-fill parkettes. Parkettes pop up in the middle of residential streets, and at one point, probably had houses on them. Now they are mostly  home to swing sets, jungle gyms and a few benches.

The parkette closest to us, the place where we end up a couple of times a day while walking the dogs, has some landscaping along one side. It’s hard to tell if the city planted the bushes and shrubs or if they predate the park back to when there was a house on the property.

Last year, I joined a group of locals in cleaning up the park, as it regularly attracts crack dealers and hookers from the area. Underneath the hedges and shrubs, we came across a pair of quince bushes. The bushes were covered in vibrant scarlet flowers in spring, and piles of little green orbs in the summer.

Regular quinces grow on trees and get as big as apples. Quinces are, in fact, part of the same family that includes both apples and roses. But these were tiny fruit, about the size of crabapples. I had wondered if the fruit were edible, and a neighbour who is involved with the local horticultural society couldn’t tell me, but my Google-Fu told me that what we had stumbled across was an ornamental quince from Japan, appropriately known as a Japonica quince. Further Googling determined that not only were Japonica quinces edible, but they made awesome jam and jelly, because of the natural pectin.

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