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Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto

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Finally started to do a little Autumn gardening

October 20, 2009 by Tricia

I haven’t been feeling all that well for the last week or so, but something drew me to the garden this afternoon.

Chris was home today – he had a day off work – and he decided to do some work on a cabinet that’s built into our backstairs. He wanted to make it as snow and moisture proof as possible so that we could store the lawn mower there over winter.

While he was outside working away I decided to come out with my camera so that I could take photos of the Azure Monkshood and Toad Lily blooms (both only bloom in mid-Autumn so I couldn’t miss those pictures!). Of course, as always happens when I go outside into the garden, I started working – tidying up the garden beds and cutting down some plants that had already succumbed to the cooler fall weather.

I think I tidied the garden for about two hours, and then I finished up by watering both the back and front yards. That probably took another hour and a half to two hours. Hey … the dog was out and she jumps into my watering stream for fun so it takes a lot longer to water when she’s out!

If I were looking to burn fat I sure got a workout. My back is aching (along with my stomach as usual). Four to five hours of bending, twisting, stretching in awkward positions … that’s my way of gardening!

Even though I’m paying for my time in the garden I’m glad I got outside and did some work today. I’ve been stuck inside for the last few days because I was just feeling awful .. hence the reason I haven’t been writing any new posts for the last week!

Do you have a garden? If so, have you started doing any Fall garden maintenance yet?

BTW in the next day or two I’ll be posting some of the garden photos I took on my gardening blog and probably my photo blog. Watch for them!





Filed Under: Back Pain, Gardening, Inflammatory bowel disease, Items to Try, Toronto, Tricia's Garden Tagged With: autumn, back, clean up, extreme gardening, Gardening, hours, husband, photos, pictures, pruning, Toronto

The Beauty of a Dead Flower

September 20, 2009 by Tricia

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As most of my regular readers know I have a garden and spend quite a bit of time working in it and caring for my plants.

I also take a lot of photographs of my various plants and their lovely blooms.

One of the things that I’ve discovered in the time that I’ve been gardening is that as much as I enjoy looking at my flowers as they bloom I also appreciate the look of the flowers as they die down and turn into seed heads or seed pods.

As it turns out – Clematis flowers produce lovely seed heads. One of the prettiest Clematis seed heads comes from my Daniel Deronda Clematis. Take a look –

Daniel Deronda Clematis seedhead 4

Isn’t that beautiful? Each strand coming off the dead flowers seed head looks like a feather. So pretty!

Have you ever taken a moment to take a close look at fading or dead flowers to see their beauty?

Filed Under: Gardening, Green Thumb Sunday, Photography, Tricia's Garden Tagged With: beautiful, clematis, dead flower, flowers, garden, Green Thumb Sunday, GTS, macro, pretty, seed head

Best way to clean pet beds?

September 20, 2009 by Tricia

For those of you out there with dogs and cats – how do you clean your pet beds?

Our dog Midnight, has two pet beds. Both are made round/ oval beds covered in cotton or canvas and filled with some soft material.

We’ve cleaned the smaller one in the washing machine in the past after taking it apart, but it was a heavy load for the washer and we haven’t cleaned it in a long time.

The other bed is large and heavy and it’s starting to get dirty. We always give the bed a vaccuum when we’re cleaning and we’ve also taken it outside to air it out, but it’s too big to put in the washing machine.

How can we clean it properly.

The pet beds are starting to smell … well … doggy! LOL I feBreze them occasionally, but I think they need a good wash. Any suggestions?

Filed Under: Home and Lifestyle, Items to Try, Our Puppy, Pets and animals Tagged With: canvas pet bed, cleaning pet bed, dog bed, dog hair, dusty, febreze, pet bed, smelly, vaccum, wash, washing machine

Grilled Halibut

September 11, 2009 by Tricia

Last Saturday evening we had Grilled Halibut for dinner. It’s very easy to make, and it’s a healthy meal!

Here’s how I prepared the halibut for grilling:

Grilled Halibut Dinner for Two

  • 2 pieces of Halibut (approx 1 inch thick, 1/2 lb per piece)

Marinade:

  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp lemon juice (concentrated)
  • 1/2 tsp paprika
  • 1/2 tsp dried dill or 1 tsp chopped fresh dill

Mix marinade ingredients together in a mixing bowl or flat dish (corning ware?) that is large enough to hold the fish.

Rinse Halibut pieces and pat dry. Place the Halibut in the marinade container, turning once or twice to make sure the fish is covered in marinade. Let sit for approximately 30 minutes prior to cooking.

When cooking fish in the oven or on the grill it’s good to keep in mind that it takes approximately 10 minutes to thoroughly cook a 1 inch piece of fish.

Prepare the grill by oiling it and once it’s reached a high temperature place your fish on the grill. Halibut usually has skin on one side so place the skin side down when you first begin to cook the fish. Turn after approximately five minutes and cook the other side for another five minutes (10 minutes in total per inch thickness of fish) or until the fish is opaque and begins to flake easily. (test with knife or fork while cooking.)

Serve the fish immediately after cooking. Asparagus and grilled vegetables are wonderful additions to this meal.

Steamed Asparagus

When preparing Asparagus I rinse the asparagus, then snap off the hard ends on the stalks. I then place the Asparagus spears in a microwave steaming dish and cook them for approximately three minutes.

Once the Asparagus spears are tender I drain any water from the microwave steamer, place the asparagus in the bottom tray with a little bit of margarine (we use canola margarine) and a few drops of lemon juice concentrate. I then toss the asparagus in the margarine and lemon juice and serve. The lemon really adds to the flavor of the asparagus. Delicious.

Grilled Vegetables

Grilled vegetables are easy to prepare and cook on the grill. You can grill just about any vegetable on the grill (onion, eggplant, zucchini, peppers, garlic, tomato etc) – just make sure that you cut your veggies large enough so that they don’t fall through the grill and or use a veggie grilling basket on your barbecue.

The other day I purchased a basket of zucchini and a basket of green peppers – what better than to grill them!

Simple marinade for grilled veggies:

  • two tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp garlic powder or 1/2 tsp finely diced fresh garlic
  • sprinkle of ground pepper
  • 1 tsp Italian seasoning mix

Mix marinade ingredients together in a bowl.

Prepare vegetables for grilling

  • 1 Zucchini
  • 1 pepper
  1. Cut Zucchini in half lengthwise and then quarter each half creating 8 zucchini wedges
  2. Clean and Quarter the pepper removing all seeds
  3. (prepare any other vegetables you might like to try grilling)
  4. Toss the vegetable pieces in the marinade and let sit for approximately 30 minutes before grilling.
  5. grill veggies on medium to low heat, turning often to prevent charring. Serve immediately once done.

If you enjoy grilled vegetables you should look at this grilled veggie recipe!  The recipe above is very simple, but if you want really tasty grilled vegetables or your cooking to impress this grilled vegetable recipe is the one that I’d use! Yummy!

This meal if very quick and easy to prepare and oh, it tastes so good! Give it a try and let me know how you liked it!

Filed Under: Dining and Restaurants, Home and Lifestyle, Nutrition, Recipes Tagged With: barbecue, BBQ, delicious, dill, easy, easy grilled fish, easy recipe, grill, grilled fish, grilled halibut, Grilled vegetables, grilling, halibut, lemon juice, paprika, recipe, Recipes, spice, steamed asparagus, tasty, yummy

We had some delicious meals for my birthday celebration

September 10, 2009 by Tricia

It was my birthday last Sunday. We didn’t do anything extra special like go out for dinner or have a party, but we did have two really great meals over the weekend in celebration.

On Saturday we went out to get our hair cut. My hair grows really fast and I was past due for a hair cut. It’s so nice now that it’s cut and it’s so nice to not have to struggle with my hair being too long!

After Chris and I got our hair cuts I decided that I wanted to buy a cake for my birthday. We haven’t had a cake, pie or really any dessert other than fruit for over a year so it was time to splurge on something tasty.

While we were in the grocery stores bakery picking out a cake I decided that I want to take a look at the fish section to see if they had any Halibut. Halibut grilled on the barbecue is tasty!

In the end we purchased over a pound of fresh halibut (expensive!), two t-bone steaks (they were on sale!), asparagus, a basket of zucchini and a basket of green peppers (on sale – 3.99 for a basket) and a basket of fresh peaches, garlic bread and a cake for my birthday. The cake was (is, there’s still some left) a banana chocolate chip cake with chocolate truffle between the layers and a chocolate cream cheese dressing. Needless to say it’s a rich cake and we’re only having small slices which is why there’s still some left!

So with all that delicious food my birthday was really a two day celebration. The steak and halibut were more expensive than our usual fair, but they made excellent meals, much nicer than the meals we probably would have gotten if we’d gone out to a nice restaurant on Sunday for my birthday.

I expect we’ll have another celebration in a week or two. Not birthday related though. We’re very friendly with our Greek neighbors and one of my neighbors grandsons is going to get engaged this weekend (i just gave him the name of one of my certified diamonds contacts from my time in the jewelry trade) and I’m sure my neighbors will have some kind of big engagement party soon that we’ll end up invited too. I’ve mentioned before how our neighbors give us food all the time (especially when they’re celebrating Greek Orthodox Easter) and inviting us to their special events … so I’d be willing to wager that we’ll get an invite to their engagement celebration. Mmmm more good food!

So … what do you do for your or your spouses birthday. Do you go all out and celebrate with a party and lots of gifts? Chris and I pretty much have everything we need (except more money!) so we don’t really buy each other gifts. We buy things when we can afford it and when we want it not just for special days or holidays.

I’ll post the recipes for the Grilled Halibut and the grilled T-bone steaks in the next couple of posts in case anyone’s interested in how we made our fantastic tasting food!

Filed Under: Dining and Restaurants, Home and Lifestyle, Items to Try Tagged With: Birthday, cake, celebrate, celebration, chocolate banana cake, Chris, delicious, dinner, dinners, Gifts, grilled veggies, halibut, husband, special, tbone steak

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