Syndicate
After a couple of weeks of quite hot (for Vancouver) and humid (ditto) weather, the past few days have been quite cool and rainy. Yesterday was quite nice. So, after spending most of the day indoors (back to school shopping; sign #1 that fall is coming), I told Raine “it’s supposed to rain all day tomorrow. We should go hiking!” And, proving that we are two of a kind, she said “good idea!”
We packed up some lunch and went for a hike in the rain on Cypress Mountain, following the showshoe trails we trekked across in the early spring. We had a blast looking at how high up the trail markers seemed to be when we weren’t walking on five meters of snow pack.
It was wonderful. The drizzle coming down through the trees meant there was practically no one else on the whole mountain. We walked until we hit a small lake, and then stopped to eat our lunches in the rain. We saw some wild low-bush blueberries next to practically every trail we took (and since they weren’t quite ripe yet, this is the reason we’re going back next weekend!); the runoff was making rivulets everywhere and the growing things were that almost-glowing green that I associate with the Scottish Highlands.
One of our many food-centred family traditions is that we get hot chocolate after playing in the rain. I was worried that my marshmallows wouldn’t combine too well with Bailey’s, but it turned out to have been needless. Delicious!
This geekend was a lot of fun. I canned up the beer L got me to make at a u-brew place here in town called West Coast U-Brew on Saturday morning, and then all three of us went out to do some berry picking at Driediger Farms this afternoon. We picked a few pounds of strawberries and then bulked up our purchase with a few more pounds, and a couple pints of raspberries.
This was a geekend because L often teases me about my geeky impulse to do something fairly basic from start to finish, when something very similar can be purchased for probably less money, and definitely less time. For example, the beer: there are stores here that sell beer already bottled, and are quite happy to simply let you walk in and buy some. But what’s the fun in that?
The u-brew place was fantastic; none of those dinky room-temperature, corner-of-the-mud-room kits in evidence here. Steam-heated, copper-jacketed kettles in which you make your wort from the individual malts, boil it, add hops, boil it, add hops, let it cool and then come back in two weeks to put it in containers. I chose cans for my first trip because I didn’t know how things would turn out, and wouldn’t know what to do with the plastic bottles after everything was done. So I came back at lunch on Saturday with 138 cans of rather excellent beer. I considered it a total win once L said she couldn’t tell it was not storebought. Now for a real test, I should buy some Newcastle and do a blind tasting!
The u-pick (I wonder how many of one’s weekend activities need to begin with “u-” before it’s officially a geekend. Perhaps just one.) had strawberries and raspberries available today, with currants and gooseberries on the horizon. I don’t remember the last time I ate a strawberry that was just picked, still a bit sandy and hot from the sun. Some of the berries were so deep red as to be almost mahogany. I rationalized eating those on the spot by deciding they were so ripe that they simply wouldn’t take to transport.
So in the not-too-distant future, I have blueberries, currants, gooseberries, blackberries, peaches and apples to pick, as well as ciders and ales to brew and enjoy. There may be a lot of things which earn my griping about living in Vancouver, but freshly picked berries and a cold drink are not one of them.