October 11, 2019
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Applesauce

Last weekend, Tuffy P went one-handed apple picking with a friend from work. She still had her cast on (it came off on Monday) but that didn’t stop her from coming home with loads and loads of the tastiest apples of multiple varieties.

What’s a house-husband to do with a surplus of apples? Today I cored, peeled and sliced a big pot-full of them and made applesauce 3 containers for the freezer and one to enjoy now.

In my mind there are a few things you can do to make a superior applesauce. The basic ingredients are apples, a bit of water, lemon juice, a little honey and cinnamon. To jazz it up, grate up some fresh ginger and also grate in some fresh nutmeg. Freshly grated nutmeg, is in my opinion, far more interesting than the pre-grated stuff. I had thought that was some kind of foodie myth, but one day I was at my local Asian market and saw several nutmegs in a little container for under $2 so I bought some. Now I’m a convert. Fresh ginger adds a bit of a kick to the whole business, so you have a hint of hot, a hint of sweet, a little tartness from the lemon juice and the apples and a bit of spice to enhance the fresh apple flavour.

Just one more reason I love the autumn.

October 11, 2019
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Wood Duck

In High Park, the wood ducks are used to people and many times you can see them close up. When I was there mid-week with Miles Hearn’s nature walk group, there was also a group of noisy kids around this little pond, though (they were having lots of fun!) and the wood ducks were sticking to the far shore, trying to blend in as best they could.

October 11, 2019
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Slime Moulds

Those tan colour blobs are slime mould. These fascinating single-celled organisms used to be classed as fungi but now are no longer considered to be part of the fungal kingdom. George Barron characterized them as “a slimy mass of protoplasm called a plasmodium. Most of their lives, slime moulds are hidden inside well-rotted logs or stumps, or buried in leaf mould. When it’s time to fruit, however, they migrate to a better site for spore dispersal. The plasmodium can travel several feet and climbs any object, living or dead, that gives it a site advantage. So, it’s not unusual to find slime moulds fruiting on green plants, dead twigs, old polypores, stumps, logs or at eye level on a living tree trunk!” (from Mushrooms of Ontario and Eastern Canada)