Time for dessert…

/ Sherry Galey / 17 Comments

torte

I’m not a vegetarian! I’m a dessertarian!

Calvin and Hobbes

Over the last few months I’ve gotten away from indoor photography since the weather has been so ideal for outdoor shooting.

And as we’ve travelled to a few new places like West Virginia and the Northwest Territories, I’ve found myself focusing more on landscapes and nature and even a bit of wildlife.

But now as November rolls in and the view outside becomes a bit more desolate in this part of the world, my mind turns more toward food, and so does my lens.

My favourite things to prepare are vegetables and desserts. I mostly leave fish and meat to others…

Sometimes I even try try to find desserts with healthy ingredients (said with tongue firmly planted in cheek). This tart has heart-healthy walnuts and high-fibre raspberries, along with the other bad stuff like sugar.

And if not low calorie, this tart is delicious, festive looking, and very easy to make. All in all a great combo for this time of year. The crust is a shortbread-cookie type crust so it’s quite foolproof and simple to throw together.

The walnuts are layered on the shortbread cookie crust first and then the frozen raspberries. Then the egg mixture is poured over the top, which gives it a pecan pie-ish look.

If you’d like to try it, you can find the recipe here.

torte2

To balance things out, here is a bonus recipe — for healthy salmon. It’s called horseradish grill-roasted salmon, and can be done on the BBQ, although we used the oven.

We were introduced to this recipe by my sister and brother-in-law and they learned of it from their chef friends Anna and Michael Olson, who have some gorgeous cookbooks out. It tickled our taste buds and left us feeling satisfied but not overly stuffed. (And quite happy to be getting our Omega 3s!) This is a great dish for company and the guests we served it to the other night were hugely enthusiastic.

The topping — we used panko — has flavour and crunch and keeps the salmon underneath very moist. It can be prepared very quickly and takes only about 10 to 15 minutes in the oven. If you don’t like horseradish you can scale it back or omit it completely.

Here’s the fish chef in our household just before taking the meal to table. You can find the salmon recipe here. I also made four veggie dishes to accompany the salmon (beet and apple slaw, butternut squash soufflé, smashed roasted baby potatoes and green beans with garlic and ginger), which were all tasty and colourful, but I was too busy coordinating them all to take pics. Another time…

What are you cooking these days?

bob and salmonsq

 

Fall in love with the earth…

/ Sherry Galey / 9 Comments

wake up and fall

We need to wake up and fall in love with the earth.

Thich Nhat Hanh

We act like we have all the time in the world. But climate change is already showing its deadly effects. And it will only get worse.

Have a look at some of what we have done to the world so far.

“Without collective awakening the catastrophe will come,” warns Buddhist monk and Nobel Peace Prize winner Thich Nhat Hanh. “Civilisations have been destroyed many times and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed.”

But he is hopeful. “If we can produce a collective awakening we can solve the problem of global warming. Together we have to provoke that type of awakening.”

With the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Paris meeting coming up (COP21), it’s  time to wake up, to fall in love with the earth and commit to doing everything we can to turn things around. We will have to make sacrifices — yes — and we need to make a leap.

Small steps will no longer get us to where we need to go. So we need to leap.

I, for one, have signed the Leap Manifesto. This is a vision for how Canada can tackle climate change in a way that changes our country for the better.

The Leap Manifesto is a non-partisan social and political initiative. Those who have signed include supporters of all parties, and some who support none. All share the belief that now is the moment for a transformative agenda to come from outside electoral politics. History tells us that this kind of outside pressure is the best gift any new government can receive.

Will you join us? Make your support your gift to your children, grandchildren and all future generations.

 

The essence of Thanksgiving…

/ Sherry Galey / 8 Comments

leaves2

Sharing the beauty of autumn…
Sharing passions…
Sharing food and companionship…

Gratitude is not a passive response to something given to us, gratitude is being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.

Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is privilege, that we are part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the color blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.

To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter’s face is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him. To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit inner lives beneath surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participants and witness all at once.

Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort, this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege.

Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Being unappreciative means we are simply not paying attention.

David Whyte, 2013

leaves3

Almost heaven…

/ Sherry Galey / 16 Comments
blackwater falls

Blackwater Falls

I am such a cliche!

It was my first time in West Virginia — other than passing through — and all I can sing is John Denver’s song…”Country Roads”.

Mostly in my head…but sometimes in the car, heh heh, in my inimitable out-of-tune style…

I just can’t help it.

But he sure got it right.

Almost heaven, West Virginia
Blue ridge mountains, Shenandoah river
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin’ like a breeze… 

We were invited to stay at a remote cabin in the eastern part of the state that had been built by a friend’s son using plans provided by Bob’s brother. A lovely cosy place with a fireplace that got quite a work out!

It was a very short trip — and the weather was rainy and misty pretty much the whole time.

But that didn’t deter us.

The first day we drove to Seneca Rocks…

When we returned home, I posted this image on Facebook just to give my friends a little taste of where I was.

seneca rockslr

Seneca Rocks

And what did I see? “You’re here? So am I!!!!!!!”

Whaaaa?

A fabulous photographer, Denise, (see her wonderful photography and writing here) who I had met while taking an online class a while back had been in exactly the same place the same day. And we had eaten in the same deli.

And neither of us knew it.

She posted her shot of Seneca Rocks too.

Now what are the chances of that happening? (We live in Canada 560 miles away and she lives in Ohio.)

Sadly, our trip was too short to figure out a way to meet up (next time!), but we had some good Facebook chats.

I surely appreciated her tips and advice and soaked up her enthusiasm for the area. Her family roots go deep and her passion is profound for the landscape and the people.

I can well see why now. She and her husband and dog, Arthur, the cutest Corgi ever, love to cruise the backroads of the state soaking up the colour and atmosphere.

And that was what we did too.

wvroad2 deerlrTWO DEERmisty scenewvroadlr

I dedicate this post to Denise, a real life mountain momma…

Sing with me…

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain momma
Take me home, country roads

— John Denver

Houseboats on the bay…

/ Sherry Galey / 5 Comments

houseboatshr

As someone who lives on a boat part of the year and loves it, it’s probably not that surprising that I’ve always been fascinated by houseboats — and would love to spend some time in one.

This summer our trip to the Northwest Territories to see family meant that we flew in and out of Yellowknife, which is 250 miles from the Arctic Circle.

This gave us a chance to see a unique community of houseboats in Yellowknife Bay, right near Old Town — Yellowknife’s original centre.

Old Town was founded in the 1930’s when gold was discovered in the area, and is situated on the shore of Great Slave Lake, a body of fresh water the size of Ireland.

I took this photo from the top of “the Rock”, a six-story rock hill in the centre of Old Town.

The image shows part of a community of houseboats that float between Old Town and nearby islands. It is made up of some 40 fully framed houses mounted on floating, anchored barges. Some are simple, one-story cabins. Others are elaborate, two-storey bungalows. I love the bright colours many are painted.

Who lives here? A mix of artists, professionals and government employees who largely work in town.

As the homes are offshore, they are not legally part of the municipality of Yellowknife so their owners don’t pay municipal taxes. But they also don’t receive services such as electricity, gas and garbage collection. Households are run on a combination of solar electricity, propane, diesel generators and wood stoves, and must deal with their own waste disposal.

In winter, they contend with extreme temperatures. Great Slave Lake is frozen six to seven months of the year. In winter, the boats remain frozen in place by ice one-to-two-metres thick. Without central gas heating, these homes can get nippy.

Some of the owners operate Bed and Breakfasts from their houseboats, giving visitors to the North the opportunity for a unique living experience.

I was curious to find out more about what these houseboats are like inside. If you are too, have a look at this short video. The video features the houseboat that is second from the top left in this image.

Having seen this I still love the idea of staying in one of these — in the summer. I think I will pass on the winter stay.

Be open…

/ Sherry Galey / 21 Comments

doorwayWhen it comes to advice on photography, there is no shortage out there — and in the hopes of improving my photography, I’ve read and watched a tremendous amount of it. You too?

But one piece of advice — from the incomparable photographer Jay Maisel, who I’ve mentioned before (see some great quotes here) — has always resonated with me, and so tends to rest there in my unconscious every time I go out into the world with my camera.

Be open. 

That’s it, that’s all.

Don’t go out looking for something specific to shoot — be receptive and willing to let that something come to you.

This is what happened to me recently when I was visiting a friend, who has, with her partner, created a magical garden in a minuscule space in the city.

The garden is as much vertical as it is horizontal, with climbing vines everywhere, producing amazing veggies and flowers throughout the growing season.

At this time of year, the arbour drips with concord grapes and the musky rich smell is intoxicating as you enter the gate.

grapes

I had in my mind that I wanted to capture the whole thing with my camera, and I busily set about shooting this view and that view. I took pictures of squashes, jalapeño peppers, nicotiana, cosmos, morning glory vines and much more… It was all truly lovely.

cosmos heart leavessq

I was losing the light so I noticed myself moving very quickly, not wanting to miss anything. But I had this feeling that I wasn’t connecting enough to this beautiful space. My preconceived notions were getting in the way.

How many times does that happen to me — to you?

So I deliberately slowed down and let the expectations go. I walked through the garden again at a slower pace, really taking in what was there. I tried to stop looking for the view I thought I should be capturing and just left myself open.

That’s when I saw the seedheads on the dill. I hadn’t noticed them at all before — they were brown and blended into the background   — kinda of mousy — not showy at all. I had been more fixated on the brighter colours and bolder shapes.

magical seedheadsrgb

But, this time they captured me. Their delicate, intricate beauty became evident when I paid them the attention they deserved.

And they turned out to be magical, even luminescent, in the fading light of the garden.

As well as a great reminder of some of the best advice ever.

seedhead