April 1st-NO JOKE!

We have purchased the domain and are shopping around for hosting while working on the content and design of the new site!

We've set April 1st as our own personal deadline to launch. I'm very excited and looking forward to the outcome and all of the possibilities!

In the meantime, follow us on twitter!

Tansy & Fern

Here are some photos from the crafternoon and cupcake swap that I hosted pre-christmas.

We made a really nice little mess!

TEA!

CUPCAKES!

Happy Family Day!

It's that time again...

Seedy Sunday Toronto

2011’s Seedy weekend events are now in three locations!

* Hart House, U of T
* North York
* Scarborough

for locations and directions, please visit http://www.tcgn.ca/

Seedy Sunday and Saturdays are hosted by the Toronto Community Garden Network (TCGN) to provide gardeners, plant-lovers and the general public with a head-start on their spring gardens. Featuring a grassroots seed exchange, seed vendors, garden and food organizations, and free workshops.

This year, the theme is Increasing Access to Seeds/Gardening/Food.

By adopting this theme, TCGN hopes to raise awareness of the full spectrum of access issues. This is why we keep entrance costs low, strive to have wheelchair friendly venues, and provide family-friendly children’s activities at the Seedy events. Our aim is to encourage community gardens in Toronto to be even more inclusive and mindful of those with special needs.

For more information:

Contact Name: Melissa Benner
Website: http://www.tcgn.ca/
E-mail: melissa.benner (at) gmail.com

Additional Contacts & Websites:

Seedy Saturdays across Canada
http://seeds.ca/ev/events.php

planting a seed

There is a brand new food/garden blog in the works and it should be up this spring! I am partnering up with one of my very smart and talented pals to make sure that recipes, book reviews, hilarious how-to videos and subpar photography flow freely!

I'm totally excited and ready to have more focus. Who am I kidding!? I have not updated this blog since November so any focus is better than my current focus, right?

The new blog will be based on healthy recipes made with real foods. Whole food cooking, mostly free of refined ingredients (as much as possible!), raw foods, and food we can grow ourselves. We are not professionals and although she has a natural nutrition background we are learning as we go which I think is a great way to approach it. We will be trying things for the first time and we will also be able to share our knowledge on gardening, sprouting, preserving and general cooking from our own experience.

I am excited! Stay tuned!

Halloween: The Food

Some pals I work with planned an amazing Halloween party and asked if I would help them out the the food. I said, "heck yes!" since it meant getting to hang with them, cook and bake stuff and not have people come to my house! Jokes! I actually love it when people come to my house but my place could never accommodate a full-scale party situation. Ben and Nat own a stellar home north of Queen Street in Parkdale and have lots of space for smoke machines, spooky decorations, dance floors and dead bodies.

My favorite part was meeting up to chat about what they wanted for the party. We went for drinks at a new place in my 'hood called Drift where we checked out some hilarifying stuff online for inspiration. Nat asked if I could make a sacrificial red velvet lamb cake to celebrate a girl who was having a midnight birthday. I did it but I'm still trying to track down some snaps because I didn't take any. You will just have to trust that it was delicious and disgusting at the same time. Success! All the cheeses were picked up at the Green Barns farmer's market. They are from my favorite cheese freaks, Montforte.

Nuclear waste punch made with grapefruit perrier, melon liquor, vodka, lemons and limes and a bunch of fruit.

These cupcakes were fun to make! The are filled with a rockmelon sago pudding and topped with green tea frosting.

I wish I would have got a close-up of the meathand but you get the idea. Check out the slimy mud pie in the background (beer and nut brownies with gummy worms).

Have you seen more frightening crudites? Unlikely! The pumpkin housed "Day of the Dead" dip. Ah hum...black beans. We also had roasted bat wings (blackened chicken wings) and shark attack skewers with "chum" sauce (satay chicken with a red dipping sauce) but they were not ready for their close-up at picture time.

Oct 25, 2010

I don't want to tell anyone what to do but if I went through life without having any beliefs strong enough to share I think I would have lost at it.

I want to let anyone who might be reading this know that I'm voting for Joe Pantalone. I met him when we were working to get the community garden set up at Christie Pits and he was a huge advocate of our efforts. He was at our community meeting in the beginning and he came out to support us and celebrate our success at the ground-breaking event last summer. Speaking from personal experience and from the experience of others who have known him for years, I could not imagine a better fit for my city.

On an even more local note, I spoke to Kevin Beaulieu on my front steps today about Dufferin Grove. We spoke about the problems they have been facing including conflicts between the city and longstanding community groups. I was so impressed by his understanding of the issues and his confidence that the events and market will continue to happen. He strongly agrees that it is an important part of the city. I think he is the most progressive and engaged candidate in my Ward and has decidedly secured my vote.

If you support urban farming, parks, diversity, and a healthy city, I hope you will come out and vote. Be informed and don't be swayed by the polls or the media. Vote for your first choice for mayor. Our city is beautiful, not broken.

There are things about the fall that include layers and delicious art.
These tiny donuts deserve a mention. Especially the ones they make in coconut fat at the Wychwood farmer's market. (Also the ones at the EX.)

Having a craft thing and cupcake swap on November 12th at 1:00pm. The girl who made my gorgeous blue scarf will be there.

Be still
Last year fall fairs.

Garden Blogging.

It seems I have managed to go through the summer without writing about gardening. Not even once. How embarrassing. It may not seem like I have been gardening but I have! I swear I have!

In fact, I have been spending my time not writing about gardening actually gardening. Gardening, feeding friends, preserving, drying, and baking. All the while, learning more and more. I don't feel so bad. I feel a little bad but not hardly bad at all, actually.

Free food has been the theme this summer! We ravaged a pals cherry tree in early summer getting more than 40lbs of cherries. We froze and canned them all after spending hours pitting.

A few days ago I cleaned our backyard concord grape vine of all it's delicious purple orbs! This morning I transformed them into a spiced jam. It tastes like the weather. A comfortable combination of fall and summer.

I flew north at the end of August for family visits and spent much of my time foraging, picking and processing our bounty. We made a kalyna-apple jelly, hawthorn berry apple butter and a sweet and tangy beet relish. I also inherited a few large bags of wild blueberries to restock our freezer. I wasn't able to pick myself since the season ended early this year due to warmer weather.

The hawthorn berries were a bit of an accident. My m

om thought they were high-bush cranberries. When we got back my dad was disgusted! "Tamara! You've lived here your whole life and you don't know what a high-bush cranberry is!" The silly thing is we also accidentally picked high-bush cranberries thinking they were choke cherries. OOPS! At least we had our kalyna for the planned jelly.

My mom passed me down this very cool strainer that was my grandpa's. It's called a chinois. I used it for my grape jam today and can imagine myself using it for years to come. It is so simple and obvious and much easier to clean than a food processor or the complicated attachments for my stand mixer. It's also OLD. Old is sometimes good.

So I guess I've managed to avoid blogging about gardening again.