Kim Bannerman's Blog, page 5

Life of Pie: Part Three

Here’s what happened.

We baked a pie, and we zipped up the recipe a bit — brown sugar, butter, a courageous dash of maple extract. We had twelve hours in which to create two masterpieces, and so we baked like we’d never baked before… I mean, literally, we’d never baked this particular recipe, ever. No one had. It came right out of our heads, just beautiful creativity flowing out of our minds and into the pie dish and straight into the oven. It was pure pie magic, people!

Pure pie magic!

And the next morning, we dropped off our two apple-maple pies — both untasted, both untested — and set up our display with the kind of slapdash, devil-may-care freedom one sees in children’s playgrounds or James Joyce novels. We were just throwing our soul all out there, never letting doubt trip us, shouting into the void “who gives a damn what anyone thinks!” Our pie display was stream-of-consciousness. It was the truth.

The contest was, as always, absolutely wonderful because this village knows how to rock a pie contest. Eighteen entries, four judges, a singalong, and much tasting. Now, as I said earlier, we made two pies: one for tasting, and one for the pie auction afterwards, with all proceeds donated to the Cumberland Community Forest Society. Let me tell you, we didn’t win a single thing, but that wasn’t surprising; there’s a lot of pride in winning here, as well as a small army of creative bakers who live in this small town. What surprised us was the auction…. our humble little maple-apple pie was the last to be auctioned, and it caused a little stir of a bidding war, and ended up selling for $80.

Yowzah!

I hope the next round of pies we bake, for next week’s Thanksgiving feast, is as successful as yesterdays. Can’t wait to get baking!

Life of Pie: Part 2

Here’s the update on last night’s pie.

I took it out of the oven and it literally looked like a hot mess. It was lumpy and bumpy, with thick globs of steaming apple goo leaking out of the cracks across its top. I was not disheartened, because I’d seen it go in the oven – when it was a cold mess – and I didn’t expect a miracle. We waited for it to cool, cut four slices, and sat down to enjoy.

It tasted… wait for it…. edible.

Not great. Not even good. It just tasted… what would be the word… functional. It was a completely functional dessert. If I’d brought it to your dinner party and served it to your guests, no one would suspect I was trying to kill them, but everyone would’ve forgotten the pie by the time they drove home. It was utterly unremarkable in every way.

Now, I’m entering two of these pies in a contest tomorrow morning, so I’m stuck with a dilemma. Do I:

(a) remake this perfectly functional pie and accept a gratious, if forgettable, defeat, or

(b) experiment madly tonight to see what sort of unholy flavour combination I can create, and if I don’t win, well… at least it’ll be legendary.

Internet, please advise.

Life of Pie Part 2

Here’s the update on last night’s pie.

I took it out of the oven and it literally looked like a hot mess. It was lumpy and bumpy, with thick globs of steaming apple goo leaking out of the cracks across its top. I was not disheartened, because I’d seen it go in the oven – when it was a cold mess – and I didn’t expect a miracle. We waited for it to cool, cut four slices, and sat down to enjoy.

It tasted… wait for it…. edible.

Not great. Not even good. It just tasted… what would be the word… functional. It was a completely functional dessert. If I’d brought it to your dinner party and served it to your guests, no one would suspect I was trying to kill them, but everyone would’ve forgotten the pie by the time they drove home. It was utterly unremarkable in every way.

Now, I’m entering two of these pies in a contest tomorrow morning, so I’m stuck with a dilemma. Do I:

(a) remake this perfectly functional pie and accept a gratious, if forgettable, defeat, or

(b) experiment madly tonight to see what sort of unholy flavour combination I can create, and if I don’t win, well… at least it’ll be legendary.

Internet, please advise.

Life of Pie

I’ve never baked a pie before in my life, and now, I’ve committed to baking six of the little bastards over the next two weeks. Including two for a high-stakes pie baking competition on Saturday.

Why? Why do I do this to myself? WHY?

The first one is currently in the oven — the test version of a robust maple-infused apple pie. I thought it would woo the judges and inspire a Norman Rockwell-esque nostalgia with its subtle, autumnal flavours, but frankly, it looks like crap. They say beauty is on the inside, and this time more than any other, I hope they’re right.

Unrestrained Book Joy

I stumbled across a copy of Paul Auster’s ‘The New York Trilogy’ in a second-hand book store today, and I was so happy that I squeaked and did a little dance, right there in the aisle. Has any book ever made you dance impulsively?

The portly book seller, sitting silently behind his desk, looked at me over the towering stack of Conan the Barbarian comics that he was sorting. He nodded slowly. He understands book-joy when he sees it.

Into the Woods

As you may already know, I’m part of Fox&Bee Studio, and we create videos for all sorts of people, groups, and organizations. One of these groups is particularly close to our hearts: the Cumberland Community Forest Society. When I say ‘it’s close to our hearts’, I mean, it is literally close to our hearts, with its trees only steps from our front door.

Today we just released our newest video for the CCFS, which has been submitted to the BC Hydro Community Champions contest. It took about two weeks to film, a small army of people, and many hours of phoning*. We filmed in pouring rain, which contained all sorts of exciting challenges. Imagine, if you will, me with my sound equipment and headphones and clipboard balancing an umbrella over Shawn and the gimbal and camera as he films a woman surrounded by eight little energetic children and a dog in the midst of a downpour… yowzah! But it really was a lot of fun, and everyone did a fantastic job.

Watch, enjoy, and visit the Cumberland Forest, if you’re in the area.

* Who knew film-making would require making so many phone calls? But it’s a significant part of the process. Future film makers, take note: texting doesn’t cut it!

Update: Autumn has Arrived!

Over the summer, life has bubbled merrily along.

We’ve been watching eclipses:

and running around in the woods:

and exploring Western Canada.

But now, autumn has arrived. I’m so excited for the cool days, the starry nights, and all the wonderful events that are popping up like mushrooms all across the island. With cold weather comes four impulses…

to eat lots of rich desserts
to crochet warm blankets and scarves
to avoid the black bears that visit our yard at midnight
to blog again.

I’m happy to be back!

Let’s Go Adventuring

Word arrived this morning that someone I knew a long time ago has died. When I was small, she lived in our neighbourhood, and she was someone I looked up to because she was SO MUCH older (5 years) and SO MUCH cooler (hair and makeup!) and smart and funny and kind, too.  I liked her a great deal, although our age difference meant we were never in the same school, did the same things, etc.

Anyway, long story short, I remember her as a wonderful person who had this certain golden radiance about her, and when I heard this morning that she is gone, it struck hard. I doubt she even realized how much of an impact she had on me when I was little.

So it got me thinking about the brevity of life and the millions of connections we make with others, some lasting and some fleeting and some more memorable than others, and how this big beautiful world is out there waiting to be explored, and meanwhile, I’m just sitting here like a lump, circling around the cosmos in my desk chair. My hands are much too clean for my liking. I want to be dirty and sweaty and one with the universe. See? Most of the time, my internal monologue is already a metaphysical philosophical circus; this reminder of the transience of life as we progressively march towards entropy has just thrown petrol on the flames.

who am I? why am I here? how do we connect? are we one soul or many or none at all? are we the consciousness of the cosmos, or just a quirk of biology, or a cruel joke by an unfeeling god?

I’ve been listening & reading too much of Alan Moore, perhaps. Can one have too much Alan Moore? I didn’t think it possible.

So it’s time to get my hands dirty, to get sweaty, to embrace adventure. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but this year, I’m not working in an office or at a desk, and my schedule is what I make it. For the first time in my life, I feel like I’m steering my own ship, and so far, I haven’t crashed into any shoals – yay!  This means our family has become remarkably portable, and I’m so grateful to have the freedom to move around the surface of the Earth during my time of exploration. LET’S GO!!!

Review: Salt Spring Island Peru

After reading about the sixth extinction (see last post), I realized that an apocalypse is a lot less fun than I thought it was going to be. I’ve spent a great deal of my life being entertained by alien invasions and zombie outbreaks, but it there’s really no sense of adventure or romance or heroism when animals just die off because humans suck and there’s a lot of us sucking all at the same time.

Sorry, this coffee review is not starting out well. It’ll get better, I promise.

The crux of it is, there’s billions of us, all consuming what we can get our hands on, and like a plague of locusts, we seem to be eating up our resources much much much too fast. If we want to change things around, we need to consume less. An easy concept in theory, but difficult to practice in a world where marketing departments are telling us 24-7 that we will feel ever-so-much better about ourselves if only we buy a little more.

We don’t want to give up what we enjoy. Why live, if not to take pleasure in living? And here is where we come to the coffee part of the review.

Coffee is the world’s second most valuable legally-traded commodity, behind petroleum. (I throw the term ‘legal’ in there because it’s difficult to track illegal trade items, like cocaine and marijuana, but I’m willing to bet coffee surpasses them, too.) Coffee cultivation takes an estimated 11 million hectares of the world’s farmland – using a little bit of math*, that ends up being .19% of the planet’s land surface, dedicated to coffee. That’s bound to have an impact on climate, biodiversity, and water systems.

I’m not proposing to give up coffee all together, because that would result in mobs of foul-tempered caffeine addicts rioting in the streets, and NO ONE’s prepared for that sort of Armageddon. But I think choosing ethically-sourced brands can have a real impact on both the environment and developing economies, and it doesn’t really take too much effort or investment on the part of the individual. That’s good, right? If we’re all taking small steps in the same direction, we really can cause some mighty changes.

Okay, so with that in mind, I’m going to review Salt Spring Island’s Peru coffee, which (in keeping with my above rant) is listed as (1) Organic, (2) Fair to Farmer, and (3) Direct Trade. Sometimes I can be quite cynical about buzz words, but I appreciated Salt Spring’s transparency and their efforts to educate the public about their goals; they take care to explain on their website precisely what they mean by these labels, rather than just fling them around smugly. Good. Points for using language for what it was intended: clear communication.

The Peru coffee is one of their classics, and it’s a popular brand, but I’d never tried it before. It’s a medium roast, very light and sassy, with these strange citrus undertones that I didn’t initially appreciate. I want bold flavours, but Peru is more subtle and summery. It seemed quite dry. Hand-grinding was a real pain, because it’s not as oily as most of the coffees I drink, and my poor little hand grinder skipped and jumped and struggled to crush Peru beans to bits. But, once it was brewed, I found it to be gentle and sweet and friendly, not pushy at all.  The more I drank Peru, the more I enjoyed it**. I also discovered that it blends beautifully with ice and sugar, making one of the best iced coffees I’ve ever had.

All in all, I think Peru is a delicious blend with a welcoming disposition, a sunny outlook, and a desire to make the world a better place. It actually restored a bit of hope to my crusty pessimistic heart, and while I have every intention of consuming less coffee, it’s comforting to know that companies like Salt Spring are using our caffeine addictions as a force for good in the world.

Four beans!

*Show your work!

30 percent of the planet’s surface is land, totaling just over 57 million square miles

40 percent of Earth’s total landmass suitable for agriculture = 22,800,000 million square miles

22,800,000 million square miles = 5,905,172,890.8 hectares

11,000,000 is what percent of 5,905,172,890?

= 11000000 / 5905172890

= 0.001863

Converting decimal to a percentage:

0.001863 * 100 = 0.19%

**What a really weird sentence, my apologies to Peruvians.

The Bad News.

In very small type, the Telegraph tells us today that “Earth has entered sixth mass extinction, warns scientists” and, while many things of huge importance are happening all around the world, I can’t help but feel this little snippet of news warrants more capitalization, a bolder font, and perhaps a higher placement on the front page. I’m sorry, but HOLY SHIT. What does it take for human beings to finally shake off the blinders and realize we’re really fucking things up?

I get that we don’t live very long, and that we really don’t know what happens to us after we die. But does that really excuse us of giving a damn about the quality of life we’re leaving for future generations? And not just of our descendants, but the animals and plants and fungi and critters that share this planet with us, too?

I need a drink. Preferably something very stiff, with a twist of lemon. And then, once I’ve shaken off the hangover, I need to consume less, recycle more, and goddammit, get mad & involved.

>:(

Here’s a quagga. They used to roam the grasslands of South Africa. They don’t anymore. DAMN.