October 26, 2013
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Recommended

When I changed my blog format, I eliminated much of the stuff that was sitting on the sidebar, convinced by my blog stats that very few of my readers clicked anything on the sidebar. This of course brought out of the woodwork those folks who really liked having that material around. I’m still considering adding a page that holds a list of recommended blogs and some other side-bar like material. That way, the links will still be around for those who want it – just a click away.  If you would like to see a blogroll back, somewhere around this joint, comment and let me know.

Meanwhile, I thought I would occasionally make posts pointing to blogs I like for one reason or another. Today, I’m going feature two blogs I came across early on. Many of the bloggers I stumbled across when I first became interested in blogging have moved on to other interests. On the other hand, a handful of them, like the two I’m featuring today, are still going strong. They’re comfort food blogs for me, always there, dependable, always interesting, ever eclectic. Both these bloggers are tour guides to fascinating and unusual corners of cyberspace.

Enjoy The Presurfer and Bifurcated Rivets.

October 26, 2013
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Storytime – Famous Waters

Famous Waters

I made the long drive to a very famous stretch of a very famous river. You might call it a pilgrimage. Following my handy guidebook, I pulled off the road, suited up, and waded over to a nice looking run. It was beautiful water with woody cover along the far bank, as good a place to start as any. Nothing rising, no bugs on the water. I tied an on attractor dry to see if I could pound anything up.

The first canoe appeared from the upper bend as I completed my knot, and headed straight for me. Two guys. Shirts off. Sunburned. Drinking beer.

“Hey, how’s the fishin’, buddy?”

“Great. Just great.”

They paddled through the deepest part of the run, and swept by so close I could have poked them with my fly rod.

Breathe deep. You have to learn patience to be a fly fisherman. Just rest the run for ten minutes.

The second canoe came by in five. And then the third and the fourth. By 1:00, 27 canoes had passed. I packed it in and drove to town to get some lunch, discouraged and frustrated. Two guys, obviously fishermen, were enjoying burgers, fries and a cold beer at the next table.

“You guys catch all the trout in the river this morning?”
“We got a few nice ones. How about you?”
“Not a damned thing. How do you cope with all those damned canoes?”
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
“No, I’m from Toronto. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“We call it the canoe hatch. This river gets 500 a day.”
“How does anybody catch any trout?”
“You got to be strategic.”
“Strategic?”

They thought it was pretty funny.

“Ok, here’s what you do. After lunch, go back to wherever you’re staying and have a good nap. Noon to four is siesta time around here. The last canoes launch at about four. That’s when you head upstream. By about 4:30, you’ll want to be anywhere up in here, or you can go over here to the other branch.”

He pointed on a little map.

“You don’t want to wait too late or all the best water will be taken. The canoes will all be downstream by then and and you’ll get some peace and quiet. Tomorrow morning, you be up before dawn and go down here to the lower stretches.”

He showed me a long stretch on the map.

“In here and in here.”

You’ll have a few hours before the first canoes get that far downstream. As soon as the first one passes you, it’s time for lunch.

I used to like canoes.

 

October 24, 2013
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Storytime – North Tongue

When I was a kid, nobody would catch a trout then release it. It just didn’t happen. We had albums of photos featuring various family members positioned beside a mess of dead fish. Believe me when I say our family killed a lot of fish.

At a certain point, I guess it was during my days at university, I got away from it. Whatever compelled me to go chasing trout was gone. And it stayed gone for a long time. It stayed gone until my friend East Texas Red talked about taking up fly fishing. Like a fiend with his dope, I was back at it again, but this time armed with a fly rod, little bits of fur and feathers, barbless hooks, and a whole new idea. We were going to catch trout and then release them back into the stream.

I read all the famous pillars of fly fishing lit – Bergman’s Trout, A Modern Dry Fly Code by Vince Marinaro, Trout Madness by Robert Traver, A River Never Sleeps by Haig-Brown, the wondefully obsessive Caddisflies by Gary LaFontaine and many more. East Texas Red and I fished all over the mountain west, often with our Idaho pal, and author Ken Retallic. Our obsession with chasing trout took us many places. We logged a lot of miles, had some great times, and from time to time caught some good trout.

It all changed for me again one afternoon on the North Tongue River in Wyoming. I remember the day very well. It was so cold when we awoke that morning, there was frost on the inside of Ken’s tent. This led to a new flyfishing rule. If there is frost on the inside of your tent when you wake up, immediately get in your vehicle and drive until you find a breakfast joint, no matter how far you have to go. It was a good rule, only rarely invoked.

The North Tongue is a smallish stream  full of chunky cutthroat trout. We could see them and they could see us. I fished hard through the morning and couldn’t raise a trout.

That’s when the flav hatch started. A flav is a mayfly, specifically Drunella flavilinea, sometimes also called the lesser green drake. It was a perfect hatch, mayflies coming off the water steadily much of the afternoon. These flavs were trout chocolate sundays. Every fish in the stream started feeding with reckless abandon. I don’t know how many trout I caught that afternoon. It reached a point where I only cast at the biggest or most difficult ones. At a certain point, I had my fill.

It was that afternoon I understood whatever this crazy fly fishing obsession was about, it wasn’t about the trout. When you catch one big trout after another with relative ease, the whole business gets stale faster than you might think. Let’s get this straight – it’s not about the trout, but it’s nothing without the trout. How can that be? You might say that fly fishing is a truly romantic activity – the thrill is in the chasing, not the apprehending. Wait, that’s not right either. The thrill is partly in the apprehending, just not if it’s too easy.

These days I don’t have to catch the most fish or the biggest fish. I still love to work a trout stream, figure out what’s going on with the bugs and the trout, and I still enjoy the reward of a few nice trout for paying attention and getting it right.

October 24, 2013
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Great Garden Awards

I mentioned some time ago that Tuffy P and I are winners for Ward 6 in the City’s Great Garden Contest for our area.  Tonight was the awards event.  There was a chance to browse photo displays of the winning gardens and mingle with other gardeners before the awards.

DSC04437The photo shows a couple shots of our front garden projected just after we received our award. Soon a rock will be delivered to our place commemorating this honour. We saw pictures of a great variety of creative and beautiful gardens this evening. Congratulations to all the winners, including the Humber Arboretum, which won a special award.

October 23, 2013
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Storytime – Yippee-ti-yi-o

Where does memory leave off and fiction take over? Some events from those summers at my father’s shop are crystal clear, like memory sign-posts. It’s that area between them which vexes me. I can no longer say for certain what really occurred. My father used to evolve his stories over the years, not letting all those pesky facts stand in the way. I wonder sometimes if I’m just like him.

Let’s take a little trip back to the Junction, back to the early 1970s. Even then it was long past the railway days. It was still dry though – I mean no booze. You had to go west of Runnymede to get a drink. What did I care? I was just a kid. Think of Alumacraft, where dad made windows and doors, as home base. Vacant lot next door. The glove shop across the street. That was grandpa and Nanny’s place, the Queen’s City Leatherworks. Guffin’s Hardware, Sid Fink proprietor. Marsh’s Hardware. Marsh could always make me laugh. Claire Morgan’s Pianos. The drugstore on the corner. Behind the drugstore, a fire escape. We would climb the stairs and slide down the pole as we imagined firemen did. The CPR lunch. Ross’s junk store, where Dad bought me my first record player. Jimmy the Taylor. The burger joint wasn’t there yet. In those days it was a diner called June and Bill’s. Coffee and tea to go in paper cups, milk and sugar in the tea, teabag left in.

We played a game involving spray paint cans salvaged from the garbage of some business or other. The kids from the lane would stand in a circle around the spray can, and take turns pelting it with rocks and chunks of cement. The winner threw the rock that punctured the can and made it dance, spraying the last bits of paint around the lane.

We also played conkers, a game of battling chestnuts. We would drill a hole through a chestnut, feed a shoelace through the hole and knot the end of the lace. Then we’d challenge one another to chestnut fights.  The idea was to take turns whacking each other’s chestnut with our own. The winner was the one left with an intact chestnut.

Jimmy J didn’t mess around with kids games. He was already into his life of crime by that time. His criminal career began with small fires and ended in the Big House. Somewhere in between Jimmy J let all the cattle out of the stockyards.

I remember or I think I remember or I imagine I remember the day it happened. Cattle wandering down Ryding Avenue and Maria St, cattle on Runnymede, on Keele, cattle on Dundas. I remember or imagine I remember green pick-up trucks with modern day vaqueros standing in the back – buckeroos – reata-men. Cowboys wearing construction boots, white, blood-stained smocks and blue bulging hearing protectors, swinging their lariats, herding the cattle back to St. Clair, back to the abattoir.

Woop-ti-yi-yo, git along little dogie.

October 22, 2013
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The Comfort Food Diner – Wild Mushroom Soup

Today, my colleague and I walked across the street to get a FourBucks. On the way, we spied some shaggy mane mushrooms – Coprinus comatus – on the grass. This left me no choice but to plan a mushroom soup for dinner.

For mushrooms I used the shaggies + I rehydrated some honey mushrooms and some slippery jacks and some lobster mushrooms from earlier this season + I chopped up some grocery store white mushrooms just because I had them. The shaggies are the heart of this soup.

This is a simple soup made special by the great mushrooms that give it wonderful body.

I started the soup by heating up a little splash of vegetable oil in a heavy pot. I tossed in half an onion, chopped up and let it cook for a few minutes with about a teaspoon of dried thyme leaves. While that was happening, I parboiled the honey mushrooms and the slippery jacks for a couple minutes (both these mushrooms can cause stomach upset in some people and a bit of parboiling apparently helps). These mushrooms don’t bother me, but I parboil them in any case because I might just share my soup.

I roughly cut up some deboned chicken thighs and tossed them into the pot and let the chicken cook with the onions for a few minutes, then added all the mushrooms and let it all cook together for several minutes before adding chicken stock. I let the soup simmer until the chicken was done. I tempered about a cup of milk and added that in, and cooked the soup another couple minutes. There is nothing fancy about the way this soup is seasoned – thyme, salt and pepper. I didn’t want to overpower the mushrooms. A nice option is to add a few slices of smoked sausage.

What a great celebration of autumn.