I Like It That Way

You will find this to be a more oniony soup than the usual kind but, as the cross old lady said when a stranger told her that her slip was showing, "I like it that way." ~ Margaret Yardley Potter

One day, last winter, I had a craving for some French onion soup.

Banish the onion from the kitchen and the pleasure flies with it. Its presence lends color and enchantment to the most modest dish; its absence reduces the rarest delicacy to hopeless insipidity, and dinner to despair.

~ Elizabeth Robbins Pennell

I had never made it before and went in search of a recipe. I decided on this one. It was more time consuming than I'd imagined, allowing the onions to caramelize but it was also incredibly yummy. This is what six or seven large onions simmered down to.

I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food. ~ W. C. Fields

The recipe states that wine is optional. Ha! I wouldn't possibly consider opting out of adding this flavour enhancer.

Cheese is milk's leap toward immortality. ~ Cliff Fadiman

And given the choice between Gruyere and Parmesan cheese, I went for the former. I probably even added a bit of the latter.

Unfortunately, there were no photos take of the finished product. It disappeared far too quickly. Plus I forgot. Mostly, I forgot (I did mention the wine, right?). But it was delicious. I strongly recommend this recipe. If you happen to make it, please let me know how you like it.

Nature unfolds her treasure at the first ray of sunrise. ~ Kishore Bansal

A winter sunrise possesses so many vibrant, jewel-tone colours. This was the view outside my apartment window, a few mornings back.


We've had some crazy weather, this winter. We keep jumping from above-seasonal highs to deep freezes, only to warm up a day or two later with rain, freezing rain or a large dump of snow. Someone (probably my sister) on Facebook suggested that Mother Nature might be menopausal. That sounded about right. As I type, we are experiencing freezing rain which weather-watchers predict will turn to rain as the temperatures rise to just above freezing over the next few hours.

A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water. ~ Carl Reiner

This image of the eastward-facing view across Little Lake was taken last week, after a snowfall and before the melt.

...now and then a giggling trail of mermaids appeared in our wake. We fed them oatmeal. ~ Tove Jansson

The water tower you see straight ahead belongs to Quaker Oats/PepsiCo. This factory has been in Peterborough since 1902 but was rebuilt after a devastating fire destroyed it in 1916. When the wind is blowing just right (or just wrong), you can smell the sickeningly-sweet smell of their flavoured oatmeal wafting through the east end of the city. At first the scent is pleasant - like fresh baking but eventually it can permeate the air quite relentlessly, forcing you to find something with which you can overpower it. Like wine.

Nothing burns like the cold. ~ George R.R. Martin

It was a brilliant, sunny day but very windy and much too cold to just sit for a while. The windchill was around -24C (-11F). I played around with the colour/effect in this and the next image in Photoshop a bit.

And finally Winter, with its bitin', whinin' wind, and all the land will be mantled with snow. ~ Roy Bean

You can see by the absence of footprints that nobody had interest in stepping out on the dock.

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. ~ Willa Cather

A glance southward.

Here am I floating

'round my tin can

Far above the Moon

Planet Earth is blue

And there's nothing I can do.

~ David Bowie

A couple of evenings ago, we had a full moon. This image was taken shortly after it rose. Unfortunately, it was snapped through two panes of  less-than-sparkling-clean glass, one window screen and the branches of a tree a city block away. Still, it demanded I take its picture. Bossy old moon!

More photos coming up.. eventually.

A Soft White Damn

The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches.

~e.e. cummings

As in many parts of this continent, we were reported to have had the worst winter in a very long time. It was cold and it was snowy. And I hesitate to speak of that in the past tense. It may not be over yet. Below are a few photos from a snowfall we had in March.


As if there wasn't already enough snow burying the land, the clouds blew in across the lake and dumped some more of the white stuff on us.





Yes, a winter wonderland is lovely to look at, but it was supposed to be spring, for goodness sake! Still, I have to admit that it has its fine moments nonetheless.





Just a few days earlier, we were beginning to see the roads reappear as the sunnier days melted some of their icy covering. This is my turnaround point on my walks with Benny. It usually takes about 45 minutes to complete our stroll.





Speaking of the little guy, he lives for a snowy day. When the shovels come out, he needs to be nearby to attack a shovelful of snow, so that we find ourselves re-doing the same area over and over again. He watches for us to make a move and then sabotages our work this way all the time.





When he's not biting and pulling at the shovel, he's barking at us to toss the snow over the deck so he can kill it down there.





And if we're not complying, he looks elsewhere for snow chunks so that we can toss them for him to chase.





I snapped this on a drive-by on our way into a nearby town. The kids had built a snow wall and were having a snowball fight. At least someone aside from Benny is loving the white stuff.





At the end of the day, I have to admit that no matter the month, it's still a pretty sight to see. The beauty of the pink dusk is impossible to deny.





And it brings these lovelies out to feed - and I never tire of seeing them.





Come morning, the fresh March snow awakens with a blush of colour and I have to admit that it looks just right.

This was a few weeks ago. Currently, most of the snow has melted and even the lake has begun turning to liquid at the shoreline. There might be hope for spring yet.

More photos coming up soon.

Orange You Glad?

Are you sick of my sunrise photos yet? Nah, I didn't think so. Even if you are, I have more to share so you'll all just have to soak it up. Get your dose of Vitamin D and enjoy.



Welome to the sunny corner of the kitchen - at least it is when the sun breaks free from the night and shines into our east facing windows.





Have a glass of orange juice to kickstart your morning. Along with the sun's Vitamin D, you get your dose of Vitamin C. Orange you glad you stopped by?





Ahh still life. A bowl of fruit warmed by the early morning golden sunbeams of dawn.





Even Skitty glows in this early morning light.






Let's have a look outside where that sunrise is happening. It's hiding just behind that tree branch.






And bathes the still-icy lake with amber intensity.

More photos in a few days.

Watching A Sunrise

Watching the clock is not the same as watching a sunrise.

~ Sophia Bedford

I've mentioned before that our lake view faces east. This means that we are frequently gifted with some stunning sunrises. This late January morning provided one of them.

Dawn was breaking, like the light from another world.

~ Alfred Jarry

Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.

~ Oscar Wilde

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.

~ George Washington Carver

Dawn was breaking over the horizon, shell pink and faintly gold.

~ J.K. Rowling

And this one woke me up earlier this month.

Climb up on some hill at sunrise. Everybody needs perspective once in a while, and you'll find it there. ~ Robb Sagendorph

There was never a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope.

~ Bern Williams

Walking on Water

For a change, I'm rather up to date with photos. These were taken a little over a week ago.




The day broke in pastel shades of loveliness.

My younger son, Alex was visiting for the weekend and was sleeping in the next room. I miss living, breathing, laughing and simply being under the same roof as this man child of mine. But for this weekend, my boy was with me and all was good. As the day progressed, we lingered over a hearty breakfast - something in which none of us tend to indulge but the occasion of his visit seemed to call for it.




It was a pleasant day, just as the dawn had predicted and Alex and I decided to take Benny for a walk on a path I'd never travelled before - at least not in winter.





Beneath our feet was the frigid waters of Lake Baptiste. Thankfully, there were a couple of feet of ice between our boots and the water. That's Blueberry Island sitting way across the bay, and it was our destination for today.





Benny was thrilled to be off leash for a change and spent his energy running ahead and then back again to greet us. Snowmobile paths made for an easy route to follow.






The water, snow, rain and wind have all done their part to smooth the bark off of these wood specimens.






I think my son also enjoyed the freedom of walking on water. He soon picked up the pace and sprinted across the bay, with Benny in hot pursuit.






It took us about a half hour to get there. Benny and Alex arrived before I did.





By far.






It would be cool to have their energy.







Once we got across the bay, it was lovely to see Blueberry Island up close and personal.






In other seasons, it's a popular spot for rock climbing. And for getting stuck. In November, the guys who are working on our house watched as a helicopter was needed to rescue a few climbers who were stranded on Blueberry's face. I was taken with the crags, holes, swirls, cracks and layers on this rocky beauty.






Snowfalls, melts and freezes resulted in enormous icicles in a few places.






By now, the wind had picked up and was blowing those clouds pretty quickly. It was time to head home.






We walked back against the wind and found it to be pretty chilly at times but our cozy home awaited our return. This is how it looks like from the lake. You can see that renovations are ongoing.

Thanks for walking with us. I'll be back with more photos before too much longer.

C'est L'hiver!

My country is not a country, it's the winter

My garden is not a garden, it's the plains

My path is not a path, it's the snow

My country is not a country, it's the winter

Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver

Mon jardin ce n'est pas un jardin, c'est la plaine

Mon chemin ce n'est pas un chemin, c'est la neige

Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver

~ Gilles Vigneault

(According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, when the song Mon Pays was composed in 1964, it wasn't intended as a Québeçois anthem. That happened later. It was written to express "nationalism, solidarity and connection to the northern landscape" and it is Mr. Vigneault's original intention I prefer to convey.)

It's been a pretty cold winter here in the great white north. Bitter cold, windy and snowy. There have been days when I've opted to bundle up and take Benny for a brisk walk in the frigid temperatures. There have also been quite a few more when I've decided to wimp out and just stay indoors. It's those days which prompted the photos below - all taken from the comfort of home.

Cats are the ultimate narcissists. You can tell this by all the time they spend on personal grooming. Dogs aren't like this. A dog's idea of personal grooming is to roll in a dead fish." ~ James Gorman

Zephyr knows that it's a day for relaxing at home and enjoying a long bath.

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg. ~ Samuel Butler

Eggs, anyone? One brown egg amid the white. Something about it begged to be photographed and so I did eggsactly that. I crack me up.

Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good. ~ Alice May Brock

Not to be upstaged by fewer than a dozen eggs, my pal Bud finds his way into most of the foods we cook around here. The eggs were probably an eggception (okay, I'll stop now).

"Hear! hear!" screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, "winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it." ~Henry David Thoreau

We're getting "the look" from this Blue jay because this is all that's left are those itty bitty seeds. The hoards of jays who frequent our feeders have already gorged on all of the sunflower seeds and peanut bits. I'm not kidding when I say that we have a lot of these bossy beauties coming around each day. There are probably close to (if not more than) thirty of them who screech, tap and demand their meals. I hear them early in the morning, every single day, tapping at the wall outside my bedroom window. They sound like woodpeckers in slow motion. They also tap outside of the kitchen. After a bit of research and and awareness of the damage they're causing to the paint, I learned that blue jays eat the paint off of houses in order to get calcium in their diets. They seem to need more of it than other birds because they're the only ones who are attacking our house. It's known to happen in particularly cold, snowy winters when they can't get at some of the natural grit that offers their needed intake from the soil. The solution? Eggshells. And for a group this size, we're going to need a lot of eggshells. I've started collecting them but we don't eat all that many eggs. I'm considering asking the local deli/bakery if they can save theirs for us. The raw shells need to be placed in the oven for about a half hour to minimize the risk of the salmonella poisoning, then crushed up into pieces smaller than a dime and offered up on a silver platter (or any old plastic plate will do) for these spoiled brats of the avian persuasion. I'll let you know if it works.

My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them. ~ Mitch Hedberg

This isn't fake. It's a real Jerusalem Cherry Pepper plant which we picked up at a local store. It was looking pretty tropical sitting in the window soaking up sunshine. But I'm not falling for it, Mother Nature. Just out of view, to the left, was a thermometer which read -27C (-17F).

We humans are the greatest of earth's parasites. ~ Martin H. Fischer

Unfortunately, our enjoyment of that plant was short lived. Peering closely at it one day, I saw tiny, red insects had set up shop in it, and the underside of the leaves were housing hundreds of their little eggs. You can see a few of them here, if you squint. Into the trash it went but I kept the pot to hold my cooking utensils.

Even the woodpecker owes his success to the fact that he uses his head and keeps pecking away until he finishes the job he starts. ~ Coleman Cox

This little lady would have probably enjoyed adding a few of those insects into her diet. She's a Hairy woodpecker. What do you suppose she's looking at?

The moon puts on an elegant show, different every time in shape, colour and nuance. ~ Arthur Smith

Could it be the moon rising in the middle of the day. This was the view out of our kitchen window, one afternoon. Strangely, I'm never certain whether to call that the front or back window. Ordinarily, I'd say it's the front because it's the side of the house which faces the road. There's a small deck just off of the kitchen but it's not where we generally sit because the other side of the house (the side that I would typically call the back of the house) faces the lake. There is no entrance on that side other than sliding glass doors which lead into the house from the deck. To me, that's the back of the house. But folks around here tend to refer to that as the front because it faces the water. What would you consider the front of the house - the side with the main entrance or the side with the view?

There was never a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope. ~ Bern Williams

And now that we've pondered that little mystery, here's the early morning view as seen through the lake-facing window. Whether it's called front or back, there's no denying that it's a beautiful scene with which to greet awakening eyes.

More photos coming up.. when they do.